Chapter 6 returns to the social movement literature to create a framework to understand who joins post-election rallies and protests. Engaging the complex literature on differential participation, this analysis highlights the critical role of information in mobilization, and explains protest using life cycle variables such as age, education, and income; political interest; personal networks; regime support; and media consumption. This analysis demonstrates that both protesters and rally participants are more interested and better informed about politics than nonparticipants. The analysis also shows that while the regime incentivized pro-regime participation, the ralliers did support the regime and President Putin. The study also highlights the importance of micro-mobilizing structures such as networks on individual-level participation. Among protesters, online discussion helped build mobilizing personal networks and frame alignment. The second part of the chapter explores the meaning of inaction. This analysis shows that popular disengagement in Russia does not signal regime support but it is linked to perceptions that President Putin is crucial to addressing shared grievances.

This chapter asks how scholars should grapple with communication initiatives that advocate for inclusion on some issues while remaining anti-democratic and highly exclusionary in other key respects. Taking the case of Turkey’s governing party, Bilge Yesil explores a wide-ranging media ecology – a state-financed public broadcaster and news agency, government aligned English language dailies, NGO digital efforts – that purport to speak on behalf of subaltern groups (Muslim refugees, African Americans, Palestinians) in the global public sphere. She argues that such efforts cannot be read as simply anti-hegemonic; rather, they must be understood as instrumental uses of “subaltern” discourses. Yesil’s analysis demonstrates why scholarship examining authoritarian and populist communication need to look beyond simply the ways such actors speak and polarize publics, and instead grasp how these efforts aim to legitimate themselves while neutralizing their critics. In doing so, she calls attention to the way inclusion-exclusion dynamics are not merely single-nation stories, but rather are constructed in part through transnational relations among nation-states.