Why Do Nondemocratic Governments Respond to Protest with Concessions?

• In Event: Repression, Mobilization and Protest Under Autocracy

Abstract

The assumption that protest in nondemocratic contexts is always met with repression remains widely held, but rarely investigated. Most work on protest continues to focus on the mobilisation phase and democratic contexts. My doctoral research challenges prevailing assumptions through an investigation of the response of Central Asian governments to street protest, and seeks to understand why these nondemocratic governments often respond to street protest with concessions.

Using an innovative Protest Event Analysis (PEA) methodology, I am constructing an original dataset of protest events and government responses to them in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, initially between 2014 and 2019. This data has generated two key findings. Firstly, in all three cases protest was more common that the literature would suggest. Secondly, contrary to dominant assumptions, protests were frequently met with concessions and communication, as well as repression and co-optation, including in Uzbekistan, the most repressive of the three cases. Whilst talks between protestors and officials can be ignored, and promises of reform can be reneged on, some concessions were concrete and immediate.

On the basis of these findings, I hypothesise that protest functioned as a mechanism of communication between state and society, allowing regimes to identify and respond to popular demands as part of a long-term survival strategy. This echoes the findings of work on the response to rural protest in mainland China (Lorentzen, 2013; Huerlin, 2016). Concessions may be offered as an alternative tactic to repression with the aim of bringing a protest event to an end, but this does not explain all of the concession cases.

Using process tracing, I am testing the plausibility of a novel theoretical framework which posits that whether or not a nondemocratic government responds to protest with concessions depends on both the coercive capacity available to the regime and the availability of information about popular opinion.

Popular mobilisation has the potential to bring down presidents, as it has three times in Kyrgyzstan, but it also presents them with an opportunity to monitor and respond to popular opinion. Protest may thus, somewhat paradoxically, play a stabilising function whilst representing an immediate crisis. From the perspective of the protestors themselves, even in closed authoritarian contexts, protest can lead to the provision of real benefits.

Author

• Katherine Geneya Crofts-Gibbons, King's College London