(iPoster) Confrontation or Concession? Explaining Government Responses to Social Movement

• 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

Background
Over the past decade, large-scale social movements have become a recurrent feature of contemporary politics across diverse political systems. Despite these shared structural conditions, governments frequently respond very differently to social movements that appear similar in scale, organization, and intensity. In some countries, governments accommodate protest demands through negotiation or policy adjustment, while in others, authorities adopt confrontational strategies to contain or suppress collective action.
Existing research often explains this divergence by isolating regime type, repression capacity, or protest characteristics, offering limited insight into why comparable social movements generate sharply different government responses across political contexts. Building on political process theory, this study addresses this question by examining how variations in political processes—particularly differences in political opportunity structures, patterns of mobilization, and the framing of protest claims shape the strategic calculus of governments facing mass mobilization, thereby producing distinct patterns of confrontation and concession.
Theoretical Framework
This study is grounded in political process theory, which conceptualizes social movements as inherently political phenomena embedded in dynamic interactions between challengers and the state. Rather than viewing protest outcomes as the product of isolated factors, political process theory emphasizes how broader political environments, organizational capacities, and meaning-making strategies jointly shape the trajectories and consequences of collective action.
At its core, political process theory highlights three interrelated dimensions. Political opportunity structures refer to the institutional and contextual conditions that shape both the feasibility of protest and the state’s capacity and willingness to respond. Mobilization structures capture the organizational resources and collective capacities that sustain participation over time, including the scale, duration, and coordination of protest activities. Framing processes concern how movements articulate their claims, define grievances, and construct legitimacy, thereby influencing how protest demands are interpreted by authorities and broader publics.
Research Design
The study analyzes 15 large-scale social movements across East Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Cases were selected through stratified sampling to ensure variation in regime type, political opportunity, and protest characteristics, drawing on multiple international datasets.
Political opportunity is measured through democratic quality and state capacity. Mobilization structures are captured by protest duration, participant size, and levels of media freedom. Framing processes are distinguished by whether protest claims are primarily policy-oriented or political in nature. Building on these measures, the analysis employs fsQCA to examine how different combinations of these dimensions shape government responses. Variables are calibrated using theoretically grounded anchor points, allowing the identification of necessary conditions and multiple sufficient causal pathways beyond additive explanations.
Results and Discussions
The analysis identifies short protest duration as a necessary condition for government confrontation. Two dominant pathways to confrontation emerge. In low political opportunity contexts, governments are more likely to confront small-scale, short-lived movements with political claims and weak state capacity. In high political opportunity contexts, governments tend to confront short-duration movements advancing policy-oriented demands, particularly when democratic institutions and media freedom are strong. These findings indicate that political opportunity fundamentally reshapes how mobilization and framing influence state behavior.
The results highlight the contextual logic of state responses to protest, challenging universal assumptions about repression and concession. Government strategies reflect rational calculations embedded in institutional capacity and legitimacy, underscoring the value of configurational approaches for understanding protest–state relations.
Contributions
This paper advances research on social movements and comparative politics in three respects. Theoretically, it re-centers political process theory as a configurational framework for explaining variation in government responses to mass protest. Methodologically, it employs fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to compare protest–state dynamics across heterogeneous political contexts. Empirically, it identifies context-dependent causal pathways, showing how similar protest characteristics can produce divergent government responses under different political opportunity structures.

Authors

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