Grievance forums in autocracies: Surrogates for protest or instruments of control?

Abstract

This article examines Russia’s Regional Governance Centres, state-run regional offices that process citizen complaints via social media, and the conditions under which citizens use these channels to articulate grievances. From an affordance perspective, I argue that citizens view opposition-led protest networks and state-run grievance portals as alternative channels for expressing grievances, choosing between them based on perceived efficacy and risk. Building on theories of collective action and selective incentives, I test whether the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the resulting rise in the costs of public protest shifted available affordances towards state-managed digital complaint systems offering individualised, lower-risk solutions. Using original dataset of VKontakte messages, I show that regional protest intensity positively correlates with citizen reliance on this digital grievance system. Using an interactive fixed-effects design, I find no statistically significant differences in complaint posting after the 2022 invasion between regions with stronger and weaker pre-war protest records. Overall, the results show that digital grievance platforms and street protest form complementary repertoires of claim-making under ordinary conditions, although the evidence is strongest in cross-regional comparisons rather than in more demanding fixed-effects specifications. The analysis does not provide evidence that digital grievance channels substitute for street protest under harsher repression.