Turning a Blind Eye to Repression: Examining Popular Approval for State Crackdowns on Peaceful Protests in Russia

Research on the dissent–repression nexus assumes that repression of non-violent protesters undermines popular support for the regime. We challenge this assumption, arguing that coercion does not automatically generate legitimacy costs as bystanders’ pre-existing beliefs about targeted socio-political groups condition how repression is evaluated. While we expect bystanders to disapprove of and sanction repression of liked protester groups, we hypothesize that they will approve of and perhaps even credit the regime for repressing groups they do not sympathize with. We probe these hypotheses in a pre-registered survey experiment (with 3,569 Russian respondents), in which we pre-evaluate respondents’ beliefs about different socio-political groups in Russia and vary the participating group and the government’s response in a realistic protest vignette. The results corroborate our hypotheses and even show that the Russian president’s approval ratings are largely unaffected by regime coercion, indicating that autocrats have much more leeway in using repression than usually thought.