Civic Legacies: Corporatism, Fragmentation, and Protest in New Democracies

• In Event: Organizations & their Alternatives: the Recent Protest Waves in the Middle East

Abstract

Democratic transitions create unprecedented opportunities for citizen mobilization, yet protest movements in new democracies often appear dramatically different from those in established democracies. This paper examines how legacies of protest organization under authoritarianism shape patterns of popular mobilization after regime change, leveraging qualitative and quantitative data from Tunisia to theorize change between pre- and post- transition protest landscapes. Under authoritarianism, protest activity may depend on affiliation to regime-allied civic groups, such as unions or political parties, whose enmeshment with the state apparatus provides a protective (if limited) framework for citizens to express collective claims. After regime change, legacy civil society groups are often de-legitimized by virtue of these “old regime” ties, and many citizens choose to mobilization outside of – or in opposition to – such groups, producing fragmentation of the protest landscape. In the absence of centralized organization, protest events are smaller, less likely to be coordinated across time and space, and more likely to employ disruptive tactics. Empirically, I trace fragmentation after regime change through interview-based case research on the Gafsa mining basin social movement. I then test quantitative implications using an original database of Tunisian protest events collected from local sources (2006 – 2016). This paper contributes to a growing body of literature examining how social movements, like institutions, experience path dependence and are shaped by their antecedents.

Author

• Chantal Berman, Princeton University