Authoritarian co-optation and depoliticization redux: the limits of a normative understanding of legitimacy and civil society to explain non-democratic regimes   

An emerging strand of literature explains how authoritarian regimes need legitimacy, and civil society can help them achieve it. Nonprofit actors can reproduce the official discourse, foster the image of an efficient and delivering government, and provide useful feedback to respond to society's expectations. Therefore, state-civil society relations can strengthen autocrats' performance and ideology-based legitimacy. However, the study of the dynamics between state logics and civil society behavior often relies on concepts of co-optation and depoliticization. Moreover, existing works lack a systematic empirical approach to advance non-normative understandings of regimes’ legitimacy and civil society’s political agency. This study fills this gap by presenting the first comprehensive analysis of authoritarian legitimation strategies behind state resource distribution to civil society, considering both performance and ideology. The focus of the work is the Presidential Grants, the main mechanism of state funding for the non-profit sector in Russia. Combining big data analysis, large language models, and quasi-experimental design, the project introduces a new methodological perspective on authoritarian state–civil society relations. The analysis draws on a unique corpus of 159,341 grant applications submitted by civil society between 2017 and the first half of 2025, parsed from the government’s websites. Large language models are used to detect civil society applications' engagement with official state discourse, to evaluate their quality, and to identify their target audiences. Two logistic regression models estimate, first, the probability that an application receives state funding and, second, the likelihood that it employs official state discourse, shedding light on the relevance of organizational capacity. Finally, adopting an isomorphism perspective, the study employs a difference-in-differences design to examine how winning a grant affects an organization's behavior—its capacity to attract co-financing, its engagement with official discourse, and the quality of its subsequent applications. Using an institutional approach to investigate authoritarian performance and ideology-based legitimation logics and their penetration of civil society agency, this study contributes to the literature that challenges a normative understanding of legitimacy and claims its applicability in investigating autocratic settings, overcoming the concept of co-optation. This work also explains that the political dimension of civil society has to be conceptualized and investigated considering the state logics shaping the sector rather than normative understandings of contentious politics. The project is an important contribution to the understanding of Russia's regime resilience, and it debunks existing assumptions of depoliticization and the irrelevance of performance to legitimize