Citizen Action and Incumbent-led Transitions

• In Event: Poster Session: Democracy & Autocracy

Abstract

The recent surge in popular protest around the world urges better answers to the question of how protest might bring about regime change, via different channels. In this paper, we theorize and use new data to systematically examine an indirect, but nonetheless empirically very important, channel through which protests generate regime change. Beyond direct and sometimes even violent change, for instance in the form of revolutions or even protest-induced coups d’état, prominent theoretical arguments suggest that incumbent elites may sometimes respond pre-emptively, and alter the nature of the regime in a guided manner, in order to avoid an extra-constitutional takeover by external actors. We further detail and develop this argument, highlighting how, in the face of mass protests, regime leaders will anticipate the gravity of their situations and external threats to their regimes. They will thus set in motion more controlled regime transitions to appease protesters and avoid even worse outcomes in the form of forced regime change. We also highlight how leaders may sometimes use mass protests as windows of opportunity to transform the regime into another regime that they inherently prefer over the status quo. We test different implications from our argument by leveraging new data on the lifespans and modes of regime breakdown and transition for a comprehensive global dataset, extending from 1900 to the present. The comprehensive dataset includes categories of breakdown that specifically identify incumbent-led transitions, both towards, and away from, democracy, thereby enabling a systematic investigation of the relationship between popular protest and regime change brought about by regime incumbents that has not previously been possible. Overall, we find that incumbent-led regime changes are only weakly associated with pre-transition mass protest, although the results vary substantially when we distinguish between democratizing and non-democratizing transitions.

Authors

• Sirianne Dahlum, Peace Research Institute Oslo

• Vilde Lunnan Djuve, University of Oslo

• Carl Henrik Knutsen, Department of Political Science, University of Oslo