(iPoster) The Legitimacy Premium of Nonviolent Protests across Regime Types

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Protest, Repression, and Democratic Erosion & Peacebuilding, Conflict Resolution, and Post-Conflict Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Protest, Repression, and Democratic Erosion

Abstract

Regime type is arguably one of the most important and well-studied variables in political science. Yet despite extensive scholarship on nonviolent resistance, no research to date has examined whether and how regime type shapes the legitimacy of protest violence. We develop moral and rationalist logics to argue that violent protests should suffer less popular backlash when violence is wielded against nondemocracies than against democracies. Contrary to theoretical expectations, our preregistered experiments on a US sample (N = 2,000) and a UK sample (N = 2,208) show that individuals do not judge violent protests differently across regime types. Compared to nonviolent tactics, violent tactics garner substantially lower public support and significantly boost the legitimacy of state repression, regardless of the political system under which the protest took place. Analyses of mechanisms suggest that people do not perceive violence as more morally justifiable, nor do they believe it will improve the odds of protest success, when it is wielded against nondemocracies instead of democracies. These results offer novel empirical evidence of nonviolence’s legitimacy premium in resistance movements.

Authors

• Yuhan Hu, University of Oxford

• Eddy Yeung, University of Oxford