Russia’s Internet Polyarchy

In a thoughtful and nuanced analysis of the internet’s role in Russian civil society (which just happened to include a few thoughtful and nuanced reflections from your humble blogger:), Radio Liberty’s Daisy Sindelar writes:

“The Russian Internet, or RuNet, is the first medium in the country to come without a built-in ideological bent. And along the way, it’s fueling a new wave of civic activism — one that may not bring sweeping political change or find common cause with the traditional opposition, but which is rapidly giving regular Russians power to bear on issues that affect them most, from car inspections to community safety to bureaucracy and corruption.”

http://www.rferl.org/content/as_other_media_stagnate_in_russia_internet_changing_rules_of_engagement/24354068.html

The article is worth reading because it avoids the Western media’s frequent hysteria about the anti-governmental potential of the internet.

But it also got me thinking: given Russia’s vibrant internet culture, why has online democracy activism persistently failed to kick-start the country’s civil society?

An answer might lie with political scientist Robert Dahl’s old school concept of Polyarchy (not to be confused withRoald Dahl’s less analytically useful, but much more delicious, Chocolarchy)
RuNet is a unique success story. Not only is it a rare case of an open internet in an authoritarian state (compare to China, Iran and many ex-Soviet republics), but, remarkably even for advanced European countries, is it almost entirely home-grown. Whereas 9 out of ten top ranking websites in the UK are American (the exception being the BBC), sixty percent of Russia’s internet leaders are domestically owned. The convergence between a large amount of highly skilled programmers, Cyrillic language requirements and Russia’s notoriously lax copyright standards has allowed its developers to corner the market with highly successful clones of Facebook and now even the US discount coupon site Groupon. Tech companies are some of the only wealth-creating industries that do not rely on exports of energy and raw materials. Giants like the search engine Yandex have become household names, while Kaspersky anti-virus systems are used all over the world. At a time when the rest of the country’s economy and supermarket shelves are dominated by Western products, Runet proclaims agency, identity and national pride.

The Russian internet is also extremely intellectually open. Last year’s landmark study by Harvard’s Berkman Center found Russian bloggers much more likely than their American counterparts to link to articles and pages from their ideological adversaries. Nor is RuNet any longer an elite phenomenon. Over a third of Russians are already regular users, and penetration is expected to reach 70% by 2015, a figure comparable to Western Europe. Cheap netbooks, affordable broadband and unlicensed copies of Windows have turned computers into what the telephone or washing machine were to Soviet households: essential certificates of respectability. ADSL high speed internet often costs less than $20 a month, and public wireless internet has also made huge strides. For example, this July, all the electric trolleybuses in Murmansk, an arctic city with a population of less than half a million, were outfitted with free wifi, even though these slow, frequently crowded and cheaper alternatives to private minibus taxis are traditionally used by older and less affluent citizens.

Yet RuNet’s openness, increasing inclusivity and heterogeneity have still had little effect on Russia’s anemic real-life civil society. Because Russian TV is suffused with government propaganda, a common assumption held that at least part Putin’s popularity derived from the lack of objective and critical information available to the public. Once internet access penetrates a critical mass beyond the small minority of affluent educated people in the largest cities, the reasoning went, then social and political change will follow.

But while internet’s availability has skyrocketed, no one seems in a hurry to storm the Kremlin just yet. Writing in Forbes, Mark Adomanis notes that “the reality of a freewheeling and rapidly growing Russian language internet is basically impossible to square with the dominant narrative that the Kremlin can stay in power purely through the effective manipulation of information.”

“Russia can be divided into two nations,” writes scholar Leon Aron of the American Enterprise Institute in his study of the internet and civil society. One is a “television nation” and the other an “Internet nation”. He adds that while “most Russians still get their daily news from television, the minority who rely on the Internet are more politically engaged.” Indeed, while third of Russia’s citizens regularly use the uncensored web for entertainment and socialising, fewer than 10% rely on it for news and political information. And while RuNet itself is one of the most blog-heavy in the world, only a small fraction of Russian internet users read blogs. By contrast, over 90% of the population continue to consume censored, state controlled TV.

As a result, the country’s most famous online personality – corruption whistle-blower Alexei Navalny – is very popular among his followers, but is known to only 6% of the population, according to another poll. And although there are over7.4 million blogs on RuNet, it was Medvedev and Putin who topped a poll of the nation’s top bloggers, and Putin doesn’t even keep a blog!

“People use the internet to watch porn not read opposition blogs,” says Nabi Abdullaev of the Moscow Times. In fact, an in-depth report published in March by the Levada Center found that the vast majority of Russian internet users are politically apathetic and disengaged. Most go online for entertainment and keeping in touch with friends, with fewer than 6% using the web to learn what is happening in the country. “Russian society is highly atomised,” says Abdullaev. “Those who participate, the political class, who don’t watch TV and who get all their news from the internet, are a fraction of a percent [of Russia’s internet users]. The average resident of outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg is not familiar with names like Navalny.”

That is not to say, however, that Russians remain in the dark about the shortcomings of their government. Polled about whose interests they believed are represented by the ruling United Russia party, 40% of respondents cited oligarchs and banks, 34% officials and bureaucrats, and only 11% said “ordinary people”. In another poll, 55% said senior government figures are just there to enrich themselves. Yet despite such consistently cynical views about their leaders and national institutions, Russians seem unwilling or unable to work together to enact change, despite the relative ease of online organisation and communication.

There are several explanations for why the development of civil society trails behind the proliferation of the internet. One key lies in the reflective, rather than transformational, quality of internet culture itself: studies by Danah Boyd and the Pew Research Center have consistently found that the internet reproduces the class and ethnic divisions already present in ‘real-life’ society.

Online social networking is only as good as a country’s real life social fabric, and Russia’s is rife with apathy, anomie and an almost pathological deficit of trust. Some of this can be traced back to the economic and social toll of the transition from communism, when deceit, crime and corruption reached epidemic proportions. As a 2008 Pew study reveals, in the first 16 years since the Soviet collapse, the number of people who say most of their fellow citizens can be trusted fell by 13% percentage points, from 63% to 50%. Low social trust correlates strongly with high perceived levels of crime and corruption, and low levels of civic engagement, two hallmarks of post-Communist society. “It is convenient for the authorities to cultivate such a fragmented society,” says Masha Lipman, a scholar at the Moscow Carnegie Center. “In a society where trust has been destroyed, it is very hard to rebuild it.”

On the other hand, involvement in social networks, civic engagement and community participation also correlate with class, urbanisation and education levels. And it is precisely the small group of wealthier and more educated people who live in the largest cities and have the strongest real-life social capital that also dominates the country’s virtual civil society: the most likely to get their news online, read and write blogs, and participate in social activism.

Where social capital is low for all but a small minority, increased access to the internet is unlikely to ameliorate it. But those who are already well connected and civically engaged in real life will also be highly connected and engaged online. A recent Pew study found that in the United States, where online access is high across social groups, the rich are much more adept at using the internet at a fuller capacity than those making less than $30000 per year. Ironically, the relatively wealthy are more likely to use the web to shop around for lowest prices, book flights and seek health advice than the less well off, who could most benefit from such activities. Likewise, while RuNet offers tremendous opportunities to those with the resources and capital to take advantage of them, it is precisely those who are least civically active online – the older, poorer and less educated residents of smaller cities and rural areas – who arguably stand to gain the most from civil society.

The situation brings to mind sociologist Robert Dahl’s (in)famous study of small-town democracy in 1960s New Haven. Although participation in local politics and civil society was technically open to all, only those with already strong levels of social, economic and intellectual capital actually ended up taking part. Polyarchy was the term Dahl gave that kind of ostensibly open but shallow democracy, in which the absence of barriers is not enough to actively facilitate entry.

In today’s Russia, civil society, online as in real life, is there for those few who have the means and wherewithal to take it up, but remains elusive for the rest. Perhaps this is why Putin has seen no reason to stifle the internet, content to let social dynamics, rather than state coercion, do the excluding. As long as Russia’s civil society remains a polyarchy, bridging the gap between elite socially networked online activism and mass participation will require much more than simply democratising internet access.