Protest and Regimes

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Mass protest and contentious resistance remain today tremendously consequential forms of political participation, pressing government elites to enact reforms, grant concessions, and, occasionally, relinquish power. But protest trajectories and outcomes are always shaped as much by the responses of the regimes they challenge as by the actions of protesters themselves. This dialectical relationship – between protest and regimes – is the central concern of this panel. More specifically, it considers questions like how and why regimes respond to protests in different ways, how these responses shape the scale and character of mobilization that emerge, and how different forms of protest may lead to different outcomes.

The panel brings together four papers that collectively shed light on these pressing questions. The papers draw on a range of methodological techniques, including interviews, ethnography, event data analysis, surveys, and experiments, to investigate these questions. Moreover, each of the studies is grounded in a different region of the world – Latin America, Russia, Africa and Europe, and the Middle East – allowing for an exchange of findings across regional sub-fields, and the generation of insights that transcend particular contexts.

The first two papers consider regime responses to protest. Katerina Tertytchnaya (UCL) examines the phenomenon of preemptive repression in Russia. Using an original event dataset of 6,000 protests from 2006 to 2017, as well as a framing experiment in a nationally representative survey, she explains why preemptive repression (i.e., prohibiting protests in advance) tends to have an inverse relationship on protest frequency. In the second paper, Erica Simmons (University of Wisconsin) considers why the regime of Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2011 cracked down on a set of protests in the TIPNIS region that were staged by some of the regime’s core constituents and raised indigenous territorial claims squarely in line with its agenda. She argues that the conflict can best be explained by the incommensurability of the regime’s versus protesters’ understandings of plurinationalism, development, and progress.

The second pair of papers consider questions of protest outcomes. Lisa Mueller (Macalester) studies how the cohesion of protesters shapes the kinds of concessions they are able to extract from the regimes they challenge. She examines this question using survey data from more than 100 European protests, and then explores the mechanisms contributing to activist cohesion using lab experiments in Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. In the final paper Killian Clarke (Princeton) argues that the explosion of protest brought about by Egypt’s 2011 democratic revolution paradoxically set the stage for the return of authoritarianism in 2013. Using an original protest dataset from the period of Egypt’s (failed) democratic transition, as well as interviews with Egyptian activists and political elites, he argues that broad and diffused anti-government protest after the revolution came to be channeled into a focused counterrevolutionary movement that set the stage for the 2013 coup.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 11: Comparative Politics

Individual Presentations

• Counterrevolutionary Protest during Egypt’s Democratic Experiment, 2012-2013 - Killian Clarke, Princeton University

• Activist Cohesion and Protest Outcomes: Evidence from Europe and Africa - Lisa Mueller, Macalester College

• In the Name of Bolivia: Protest and Repression in the TIPNIS - Erica S. Simmons, University of Wisconsin, Madison

• Pre-emptive Repression and Protests in Electoral Autocracies - Katerina Tertytchnaya, University College London

Chair

• Olga Onuch University of Manchester

Discussant

• Graeme Robertson