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Repression is intended by authoritarian regimes to fulfill two functions. One is to neutralize individuals whose political activity the regime finds threatens its grip on power. The second is “pour encourager les autres” – to spread fear amongst the general population that participation in protest activities is potentially dangerous and so should be avoided. And sometimes repression works just as intended (Young 2019). However, the relationship between repression and protest is, in reality, one of the most complicated and confusing relationships in political science (Davenport 2005). Sometimes repression does indeed reduce protest, but other times it feeds protest – for every Zimbabwe, there is a Ukrainian EuroMaidan. With this experiment, we contribute to the large literature examining the relationship between repression, fear, regime legitimacy and protest. The general issue of the relationship between repression and either quiescence or intensification or myriad outcomes in between (Grimm and Harders 2017) has been answered in many different ways in part because posed in this way, the question is overly-aggregated. Eventual outcomes are the product of many mechanisms at the individual, collective and societal level and the behavior of actors from radical protesters, through passive bystanders, to generals and policemen with batons. At the individual level, researchers have focused both on the specific chilling or radicalizing effect on protesters themselves (Elefsen 2021) and on factors such as the identity of protesters and tactics employed by protesters that shape interpretation of the protests by the broader public (Edwards and Arnon 2019). In this research, we take a somewhat different angle looking specifically at one element of this relationship – the effect of mass arrests on the streets on the attitudes and opinions of different parts of society. Focusing on mass street-level repression of the protests that accompanied the return of Alexei Navalny to Russia from Berlin after his poisoning by agents of the Russian state, we look at how different parts of the Russian population interpret the implications of mass repression for both their own protest behavior and for that of the rest of the population. We use an online survey experiment to test what the impact of violent state repression is on both attitudes to protest and respondents’ perceptions of the legitimacy of the regime deploying the repression. This approach allows us to investigate at the individual level the nexus of fear and delegitimization that often is thought to underlie either quiescence or backlash in the context of protest. In addition, we explore the mechanisms underlying either quiescence or backlash. There is scant existing literature on this issue. Building on literature in political psychology, Young (2020) provides evidence from a survey experiment in Zimbabwe that the response to repression depends on the individual trait of self-efficacy. Using a standard battery of questions to measure self-efficacy, she shows that more efficacious citizens are more willing than others to participate in future protests in the presence of information about repression. Influenced more by the literature on protest, Aytac et al. (2018) look at the effect of repression through the lens of information revelation and fear. They find evidence that information about repression increases fear amongst survey participants and reduces their expressed willingness to protest. By contrast, they find no evidence that information about repression is used by citizens to change their evaluations of the strength of the government. Here we develop the approach of Aytac et al, looking at fear and information but also at a key aspect of repression evident in the protest literature, legitimacy. We expect that while some citizens are likely to respond to repression with fear, others will respond with anger and outrage at the abrogation of the state’s responsibility to ensure that citizens are able to exercise their political rights in safety and security. These angry/outraged citizens will show greater support for the right to protest, will place blame for violence at the feet of the authorities and will think that repression reduces the extent to which the authorities deserve the support of the people.

In this study we examine the effects of conspiracy theory belief on willingness to be vaccinated in Russia. Most existing studies suggest that trust in the authorities leads to greater willingness to be vaccinated and we expect to observe the same thing. However, we also expect that for a subset of people, greater trust in the authorities will lead to greater trust in Kremlin sponsored conspiracy theories and that greater trust in conspiracies will have a negative effect on willingness to be vaccinated. We test this theory using data from an online survey experiment.

The inherent atomistic precision of synthetic chemistry enables bottom-up structural control over quantum bits, or qubits, for quantum technologies. Tuning paramagnetic molecular qubits that feature optical-spin initialization and readout is a crucial step toward designing bespoke qubits for applications in quantum sensing, networking, and computing. Here, we demonstrate that the electronic structure that enables optical-spin initialization and readout for S = 1, Cr(aryl)4, where aryl = 2,4-dimethylphenyl (1), o-tolyl (2), and 2,3-dimethylphenyl (3), is readily translated into Cr(alkyl)4 compounds, where alkyl = 2,2,2-triphenylethyl (4), (trimethylsilyl)methyl (5), and cyclohexyl (6). The small ground state zero field splitting values (