In this commentary, I use the current protest movement in Israel as an entry point to discuss urban autonomy and social protest in an age of growing polarization between progressive cities and ...reactionary states. While the nationwide protest is not explicitly framed in urban versus national terms, it has a clear urban dimension. Tel-Aviv-Jaffa is not only the place where the protest movement is the strongest, but the municipality also leverages the protest to demand enhanced autonomy against the right-wing government’s illiberal agendas. I suggest that viewing urban protest through an urban autonomy lens is useful to fully unpack the current wave of protest and situate it within the larger political processes that shape it.
In "Why Democracy Protests Do Not Diffuse," we examine whether or not countries are significantly more likely to experience democracy protests when one or more of their neighbors recently experienced ...a similar protest. Our goal in so doing was not to attack the existing literature or to present sensational results, but to evaluate the extent to which the existing literature can explain the onset of democracy protests more generally. In addition to numerous studies attributing to diffusion the proliferation of democracy protests in four prominent waves of contention in Europe (1848, 1989, and early 2000s) and in the Middle East and North Africa (2011), there are multiple academic studies, as well as countless articles in the popular press, claiming that democracy protests have diffused outside these well-known regions and periods of contention (e.g., Bratton and van de Walle 1992; Weyland 2009; della Porta 2017). There are also a handful of cross-national statistical analyses that hypothesize that anti-regime contention, which includes but is not limited to democracy protests, diffuses globally (Braithwaite, Braithwaite, and Kucik 2015; Gleditsch and Rivera 2017; Escriba-Folch, Meseguer, and Wright 2018). Herein, we discuss what we can and cannot conclude from our analysis about the diffusion of democracy protests and join our fellow forum participants in identifying potential areas for future research. Far from closing this debate, we hope our article will stimulate...
History suggests universities are hotbeds of political protest. However, the generality and causal nature of this relationship has never been quantified. This article investigates whether ...universities give rise to political protest, drawing on geocoded information on the location and characteristics of universities and protest events in the 1991–2016 period, at the subnational level in 62 countries in Africa and Central America. Our analysis indicates that university establishments increase protest. We use a difference-in-differences and fixed-effect framework leveraging the temporal variation in universities within subnational grid-cells to estimate the effect of universities on protest. Our analysis indicates that localities with increases in number of universities experience more protest. We suggest a causal interpretation, after performing different tests to evaluate whether this reflects confounding trends specific to locations that establish universities, finding no support for this. We also provide descriptive evidence on the nature of university-related protests, showing that they are more likely to emerge in dictatorships and that protests in university locations are more likely to concern democracy and human rights. These findings yield important general insights into universities’ role as drivers of contentious collective action.
A qualitative shift is underway in the nature of labor protest in China. Contrary to prior literature that characterized strikes as being largely defensive in nature, the authors suggest that since ...2008, Chinese workers have been striking offensively for more money, better working conditions, and more respect from employers. They explain these developments using a "political process" model that suggests economic and political opportunities are sending "cognitive cues" to workers that they have increased leverage, leading them to be more assertive in their demands. Such cues include a growing labor shortage, new labor laws, and new media openness. Their argument is supported by a unique data set of strikes that the authors collected, two case studies of strikes in aerospace factories, and interviews with a variety of employment relations stakeholders.
This article analyses the state of democracy in the world in 2019. We demonstrate that the "third wave of autocratization" is accelerating and deepening. The dramatic loss of eight democracies in the ...last year sets a new record in the rate of breakdowns. Exemplifying this crisis is Hungary, now the EU's first ever authoritarian member state. Governmental assaults on civil society, freedom of expression, and the media are proliferating and becoming more severe. A new and disturbing trend is that the quality of elections is now also deteriorating in many countries. Nevertheless, there are also positive signs: pro-democracy protests reached an all-time high in 2019. People are taking to the streets to protest the erosion of democracies and challenge dictators. Popular protests have contributed to substantial democratization in 22 countries over the last ten years - including Armenia, Tunisia, and Ecuador. This was before the Covid-19 pandemic. Responses to the crisis, including many states of emergencies, risk further accelerating autocratization.
Why Men (and Women) Do and Don’t Rebel Jost, John T.; Chaikalis-Petritsis, Vagelis; Abrams, Dominic ...
Personality & social psychology bulletin,
02/2012, Volume:
38, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Three studies examined the hypothesis that system justification is negatively associated with collective protest against ingroup disadvantage. Effects of uncertainty salience, ingroup identification, ...and disruptive versus nondisruptive protest were also investigated. In Study 1, college students who were exposed to an uncertainty salience manipulation and who scored higher on system justification were less likely to protest against the governmental bailout of Wall Street. In Study 2, May Day protesters in Greece who were primed with a system-justifying stereotype exhibited less group-based anger and willingness to protest. In Study 3, members of a British teachers union who were primed with a “system-rejecting” mind-set exhibited decreased system justification and increased willingness to protest. The effect of system justification on nondisruptive protest was mediated by group-based anger. Across very different contexts, measures, and methods, the results reveal that, even among political activists, system justification plays a significant role in undermining willingness to protest.
The uprisings which swept across the Arab world beginning in December 2010 pose a serious challenge to many of the core findings of the political science literature focused on the durability of the ...authoritarian Middle Eastern state. The impact of social media on contentious politics represents one of the many areas which will require significant new thinking. The dramatic change in the information environment over the last decade has changed individual competencies, the ability to organize for collective action, and the transmission of information from the local to the international level. It has also strengthened some of the core competencies of authoritarian states even as it has undermined others. The long term evolution of a new kind of public sphere may matter more than immediate political outcomes, however. Rigorous testing of competing hypotheses about the impact of the new social media will require not only conceptual development but also the use of new kinds of data analysis not traditionally adopted in Middle East area studies.
The use of violent coercion to repress unarmed protests, such as that seen during the Arab Spring, sometimes backfires on the government – an outcome called 'political jiu-jitsu'. Examining unique ...global data covering extreme violence used by governments against unarmed protests from 1989 to 2011 (drawn from UCDP) and the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) data, this study aims to explain the conditions under which this outcome occurs. This study contributes to both the nonviolent action and one-sided violence literatures by further disaggregating this effect into both domestic and international outcomes, a distinction that has not previously been made in empirical studies. We find evidence that a pre-existing campaign infrastructure increases the likelihood of increased domestic mobilization and security defections after violent repression, but is unrelated to international backlash. Within ongoing NAVCO campaigns we find that parallel media institutions increase the likelihood of increased domestic mobilization and international repercussions after repression, and that this effect holds true for both traditional media and 'new' (i.e. internet-based) media. One of the novel contributions of this study is that we identify an important selection effect in the NAVCO data and the critical role of organizational infrastructure, especially communications infrastructure, in generating preference changes that create the conditions where killing unarmed civilians becomes costly for repressive governments. We conclude with a discussion of the potential implications of this study and avenues for future research.
Whereas optimists see the so-called Arab Spring as similar to the revolutions of 1989, and likely to bring about democratic rule, skeptics fear that protest bringing down dictators may simply give ...way to new dictatorships, as in the Iranian revolution. Existing research on transitions has largely neglected the role of protest and direct action in destabilizing autocracies and promoting democracy. We argue that protest and direct action can promote transitions in autocracies, and that the mode of direct action, that is, whether violent or nonviolent, has a major impact on the prospects for autocratic survival and democracy. We present empirical results supporting our claim that nonviolent protests substantially increase the likelihood of transitions to democracy, especially under favorable international environments, while violent direct action is less effective in undermining autocracies overall, and makes transitions to new autocracies relatively more likely.
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