http://dx.doi.org/10.17176/20190815-201155-0 https://staging.verfassungsblog.de/putin-and-the-costs-of-being-wrong/ Putin and the Costs of Being Wrong Libman, Alexander ger 2019-08-15 electronic resource text/html ddc:342 Authoritarianism Electoral Fraud Vladimir Putin Verfassungsblog Verfassungsblog--2366-7044 CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Since mid-2019, Moscow experiences a wave of public protests, triggered by the decision of the government not to allow several opposition candidates to run for the city parliament in the elections scheduled for September. How can we explain this unprecedented rise of spontaneous protests activity? For me, the protests in Moscow are an example of a core problem any authoritarian regime faces but which is frequently overlooked by the analysts and scientists: the risks of mistakes.