Authoritarian resource distribution to civil society and political legitimation in Russia

How do authoritarian legitimation strategies shape the allocation of state resources to civil society organizations, and what kind of alignment between state and civil society's action do they produce? This article addresses these questions by analyzing Russia's Presidential Grants. By operationalizing the regime's ideology and performance-based legitimation strategies through state grant redistribution, this work reveals a meta-regulated, state-engineered non-profit sector. The government reshapes civil society's behavior primarily through centralized rules and standards rather than corporatism and co-option. In addition, the findings challenge the expectation that performance-based legitimation strategies straightforwardly produce depoliticization and highlight the underexamined role of technocratic governance in sustaining authoritarian resilience. The analysis is based on text analysis of over 150,000 grant applications submitted by civil society for project funding between 2017 and the first half of 2025.