(iPoster) Repression and the Geography of Backlash: Evidence from Indonesia

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Migration and Citizenship & Political Beliefs and Democratic Legitimacy
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Political Beliefs and Democratic Legitimacy

Abstract

Do protests inspire subsequent protests or do protest waves merely reflect shared underlying conditions? We address this challenge using spatial-temporal point process models that explicitly separate baseline protest risk from endogenous self-excitation. We apply these models to Indonesian protest history and find strong evidence of temporal self-excitation where protests significantly increase the short-term likelihood of subsequent events but find no evidence of spatial-excitation in that protests do not preferentially trigger nearby protests. We further show that violent protests exhibit greater mobilization potential than non-violent protests, which are associated with approximately 17% percent fewer follow-on events. These findings demonstrates how point process models can address longstanding empirical challenges in studying protest diffusion and yield new insights into the dynamics of collective actions.

Authors

• Daniel Carnahan, UCLA

• Risa Toha, Wake Forest University