State Capacity and Protest: How Authoritarian State-Building Unintentionally Fuels Contention

• In Event: Mobilization Under (Growing) Autocracy

Abstract

Authoritarian state capacity is typically associated with protest suppression, yet classic theorists like de Tocqueville noted that regimes often become more vulnerable when they reform. It remains unclear, however, why contention can grow even when reforms succeed, as in contemporary China. Building on the concept of cognitive liberation and the rights-versus-rules consciousness debate, this paper revisits China’s protest surge by arguing that state capacity-building unintentionally generates the cognitive conditions for protests. I demonstrate this causal relationship by leveraging the staggered implementation of a nationwide school admissions reform. Using a city-year panel of 434 school admissions protests between 2010 and mid-2017, I combine survival analysis and difference-in-differences to show that the reform significantly increased both the onset and frequency of school admissions protests. Drawing on longitudinal fieldwork, I explain three mechanisms of the causal relationship: procedures made injustice legible, record-keeping enabled claim-making, and enforcement produced group interests. A supplementary cross-national analysis further shows that short-run increases in state capacity are associated with higher protest participation in autocracies but not democracies, suggesting that capacity expansion may be especially destabilizing in authoritarian contexts. Together, these findings highlight how successful governance reforms can transform routine administrative encounters in ways that facilitate protest, complicating prevailing views of authoritarian state capacity as primarily a tool of social control.

Author

• Fangsheng Zhu, Duke Kunshan University