Jan Matti Dollbaum

I’m a post-doctoral research fellow at the Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy (SOCIUM) at the University of Bremen, working on a comparative project on protest dynamics in Germany as part of the Research Institute on Social Cohesion (Forschungsinstitut Gesellschaftlicher Zusammenhalt). I am also an Associated Junior Fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study, HWK) and an affiliated researcher at the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen.

I have been a visiting researcher at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, working with Graeme Robertson, and at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow.

My research focuses on contentious politics and social movements in Eastern and Western Europe, with a special focus on the long-term interactions between protest and politics across different regime types. In parallel, I am developing a research program on popular perceptions of regime responsiveness. My work has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Post-Soviet Affairs, Social Movement Studies, and other places. It has recently been featured in the Washington Post and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

Together with Ben Noble and Morvan Lallouet I am currently working on a book manuscript on Navalny’s politics and his movement for a broad, non-specialist readership. It is going to appear in August 2021 with Hurst Publishers (UK) and Oxford University Press (US).

In my PhD, defended in January 2020, I compared trajectories of local protest institutionalization in authoritarian regimes – on the example of the ‘For Fair Elections’ protest cycle in four Russian regions. My academic book project is an extension of this work.

To advance the Open Science movement in the social sciences, I’m a curator pf protest data at Discuss Data.

Feel free to get in contact at: dollbaum [at] uni-bremen [dot] de

Recent publications
- Navalny’s digital dissidents: A new dataset on Russian opposition supporters. Problems of Post-Communism, with Andrei Semenov.
- Using Protest Event Analysis to study labour conflict in authoritarian regimes: The Monitoring of Labour Protest dataset. Global Social Policy, in press.
- When does diffusing protest lead to local organization building? Evidence from a comparative subnational study of Russia’s “For fair Elections” movement. Perspectives on Politics.
- Social policy on social media: How opposition actors use Twitter and VKontakte to frame the Russian pension reform. In: Problems of Post-Communism (online first).