Nonprofit influence on public policy : exploring nonprofit advocacy in Russia

This paper examines the advocacy tactics of Russian NPOs. While Russian NPOs and their activities have been widely researched, specific insight into their use of advocacy tactics remains limited. In this paper we address this gap by broadening the understanding of how NPOs engage in advocacy. To do so we operationalize both Mosley’s (2012) indirect/insider framework and qualitative data collected from health and education NPOs (HENPOs) in three industrial Russian regions. We demonstrate that Russian HENPOs, whilst having access to various advocacy tactics, fail to employ these tactics effectively vis-à-vis influencing of ruling and governing elites. They are instead used for organizational maintenance and case/client advocacy. In concluding, we discuss a potential typology of advocacy tactics in Russia, the usefulness of Mosley’s framework in this context and the implications of the failure to advocate for democratization within the Russian Federation