Nonprofit Influence on Public Policy: Exploring Nonprofit Advocacy in Russia

This article examines the advocacy tactics of Russian nonprofits. While Russian nonprofits and their activities have been widely researched, specific insight into their use of advocacy tactics remains limited. In this article, we address this gap by broadening the understanding of how Russian nonprofits engage in advocacy. To do so we engage both Mosley’s indirect/insider framework and qualitative data collected from health and education nonprofits (HEnonprofits) in three Russian industrial regions. We demonstrate that Russian HEnonprofits, while having access to various advocacy tactics, fail to use them effectively. They are instead used for organizational maintenance and case/client advocacy. In conclusion, 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.