When Regimes Do Not Mobilize: Explaining Subnational Variation in Pro-Government Rallies in Serbia

Competitive authoritarian regimes organize pro-government rallies to signal strength, deter opposition, and discredit anti-government rallies. Yet, the decision of whether and when to mobilize supporters remains under examined in this regime type, especially at the subnational level. This paper addresses that gap by comparing divergent outcomes in two Serbian cities, Niš and Novi Sad. It seeks to explain why the Serbian government failed to mobilize its supporters in Niš when it successfully mobilized supporters in Novi Sad during the same protest wave in 2025 by extending Hellmeier and Weidmann’s theory of pro-government rallies in authoritarian regimes, which views state-mobilized movements as a high-risk calculus based on opposition threat and regime capacity (Hellmeier and Weidmann 2020). I argue that in Niš, non-mobilization was a rational outcome due to lower party organizational capacity, higher reputational risk, and lower anticipated turnout compared to Novi Sad. Combining digital ethnographic methods and qualitative interviewing, I isolate subnational variation in party networks, elite incentives, and participant turnout in this within-case comparison. More specifically, I analyze city-level interactions on Facebook and Telegram and triangulate these observations with semi-structured interviews with activists and journalists. This mixed methods design offers a novel approach to exploring how localized conditions can affect a competitive authoritarian regime’s mobilization calculus. It also offers theoretical insights for understanding the durability of competitive authoritarian regimes, speaking directly to the core aims of this section.