Blogging for the Sake of the President: The Online Diaries of Russian Governors

This work was supported by research fellowships of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation (Cologne, Germany), the Harriman Institute (Columbia University, New York, USA), and the Aleksanteri Institute (University of Helsinki, Finland). I owe thanks to Vlad Strukov for constructive critique of two previous versions of this essay.Supplementary material for this essay can be found in the online version available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ceas20 (Figures S1–S5). Many Western researchers have hailed blogs of politicians as new, interactive and ‘inherently democratic’ tools of political communication. Yet, as this essay illustrates, blogs can be of comparatively even greater appeal to politicians in semi-authoritarian political contexts. In Russia, 29 out of 83 regional leaders (roughly 35%) were keeping a weblog in May 2010. This essay provides a comprehensive content analysis of all governors’ blogs and, subsequently, fleshes out a typology of three characteristic types. It is argued that politicians’ blogs are playing a far greater role in generating legitimacy for the Russian political system than they do in democracies, because the semi-authoritarian Russian system lacks other mechanisms which generate (input) legitimacy in developed democracies, such as highly competitive elections.