Do protests sway public opinion? If so, why and how? To address these questions, we examine the impact of the 2006 immigration protests on immigration policy preferences. We use the 2006 Latino ...National Survey coupled with protest data to examine whether temporal and spatial exposure to the protests are associated with policy preferences. Our findings lend evidence that protest activity influences Latinos' immigration policy preferences. However, the findings suggest the effect of protest on immigration policy preferences is not uniform across the population, but rather contingent on generational status and the intensity of protest activity at the local level.
Canonical theories of elections assume that rules determining the winner will be followed, which necessitates separate models for democratic and nondemocratic elections. To overcome this bifurcation ...in the literature, we develop a model where compliance is determined endogenously. Rather than serve as a binding contract, elections are modeled solely as a public signal of the regime’s popularity. However, citizens can protest against leaders who break electoral rules. Compliance is possible when the election is informative enough that citizens can coordinate on either massive protests or supporting the incumbent in the case of close results. Leaders may also step down after performing poorly in a less informative election independent of the rules, but unlike the case of rule-based alternation, this often requires citizens to protest in equilibrium. An extension shows why reports of electoral fraud are often central to post-election protests and thus why international or domestic monitoring may be required for electoral rules to be enforceable.
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, a crucial question is whether popular protest is now likely to be a permanent part of Middle Eastern politics or if the protests that have taken place over the ...past two years are more likely to be a "one-shot deal." We consider this question from a theoretical perspective, focusing on the relationship between the consequences of protests in one period and the incentives to protest in the future. The model provides numerous predictions for why we might observe a phenomenon that we call the "one-shot deal": when protest occurs at one time but not in the future despite an intervening period of bad governance. The analysis focuses on the learning process of citizens. We suggest that citizens may not only be discovering the type or quality of their new government—as most previous models of adverse selection assume—but rather citizens may also be learning about the universe of potential governments in their country. In this way, bad performance by one government induces some pessimism about possible replacements. This modeling approach expands the formal literature on adverse selection in elections in two ways: it takes seriously the fact that removing governments can be costly, and it explores the relevance of allowing the citizen/principal to face uncertainty about the underlying distribution from which possible government/agent types are drawn.
In the Trump era, when clashes between right wing protesters and left counter protesters escalate, police disproportionately repress left wing activists. Explanations that rest solely on the ...conservative politics and culture of the police, or the ideological targeting of the left neglect the ways political systems, identities and organizations shape interactions between police and protesters. This study draws on the research on social movements, counter‐protest and protest policing in order to explain the patterns of policing of counter‐protest.
This article explores the relationship between competitive authoritarianism and popular protest. Building upon comparative regime analysis and social movement research, it argues that this hybrid ...regime type facilitates popular protest by providing opposition forces with considerable institutional resources to organize themselves and confront regime elites, along with grievances that provide strong incentives for popular challenges. In turn, popular protest may trigger regime crisis and extract important concessions from regime incumbents. In the long run, popular politics strongly shapes the interests, identities and capacities of regime elites and opposition forces, as well as the regime's formal and/or informal institutions, and may lead to government change and/or regime change. Evidence is provided from Serbia under Milošević, which experienced massive opposition protest campaigns in 1991, 1992, 1996-1997, 1999 and 2000, which resulted in regime change.
I review the development of the political opportunity or political process perspective, which has animated a great deal of research on social movements. The essential insight—that the context in ...which a movement emerges influences its development and potential impact—provides a fruitful analytic orientation for addressing numerous questions about social movements. Reviewing the development of the literature, however, I note that conceptualizations of political opportunity vary greatly, and scholars disagree on basic theories of how political opportunities affect movements. The relatively small number of studies testing political opportunity hypotheses against other explanations have generated mixed results, owing in part to the articulation of the theory and the specifications of variables employed. I examine conflicting specifications of the theory by considering the range of outcomes scholars address. By disaggregating outcomes and actors, I argue, we can reconcile some of the apparent contradictions and build a more comprehensive and robust theory of opportunities and social movements.
A key debate in the new literature on authoritarianism concerns the role of institutions in general and legislatures in particular. While much of the literature accepts that authoritarian ...legislatures matter, there is little agreement as to why and how. In this article, we argue that a key function of authoritarian legislatures is to help leaders reduce social protest. In contrast to existing literature, which stresses the representative function of authoritarian legislatures, we argue that legislatures reduce social protest by providing rent-seeking opportunities to key opposition elites who, in return for access to these spoils, demobilize their supporters. We test this argument using original data on the distribution of leadership positions in 83 Russian regional legislatures and two new datasets on opposition protest in Russia. Our findings suggest that legislative cooptation may extend the lifespan of authoritarian regimes by helping to reduce antiregime protest.
Protests against coronavirus policies have occurred in all European countries. The intensity of protest varies strongly, however. We explain this variation by strategic choices that protest ...organizers make to maintain the protest movement. Specifically, we argue that protest organizers pay heed to the dynamics of the pandemic in their country: the number of protest events is higher when and where mortality rates are lower and containment policies are more stringent. At the same time, the number of protest events is influenced by political factors. Despite the fact that civil liberties facilitate trust in government, these two variables exert opposite effects: while higher trust in government and public administration reduces the number of protest events, stronger civil liberties increase the number of protest events. We find evidence for these hypotheses in an analysis of the number of monthly protest events based on information from ACLED, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, in 28 European countries between March 2020 and August 2021.
The events of the Arab Spring have suggested the necessity of rethinking the logic of authoritarian persistence in the Arab world. However, the internal variation in regime collapse and survival ...observed in the region confirms earlier analyses that the comportment of the coercive apparatus,
especially its varying will to repress, is pivotal to determining the durability of the authoritarian regimes. At the same time, the trajectory of the Arab Spring highlights an empirical novelty for the Arab world, namely, the manifestation ofhuge, cross-class, popular protest in the name
of political change, as well as a new factor that abetted the materialization of this phenomenon-the spread of social media. The latter will no doubt be a game changer for the longevity of authoritarian regimes worldwide from now on.
This article offers a preliminary analysis of the hundreds of youth-inspired mass protests staged in Thailand during 2020. It argues that while calling for reforms and flirting with revolutionary ...rhetoric, the protestors lacked a clear programmatic agenda and were primarily engaged in disrupting dominant narratives about the country's politics, especially in relation to the previously taboo question of the political role of the monarchy. Despite the ad hoc and sometimes incoherent nature of the protests, the students mounted a dramatic challenge to Thailand's ruling elite. Ultimately, the conflict exemplified a generational divide: people from Generation Z, aged under 25, have radically different understandings of power, deference and legitimacy from older population groups. Whatever happens to the protest movement in the short term, the demonstrators have made a decisive break with the old social consensus that existed during the long reign of the late King Bhumibol (1946-2016).
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