Collaborative Research: RAPID: A Novel Framework & Toolkit to Measure Protest Legacies in Non-democratic States

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

Large-scale protests are missed opportunities to improve our understanding of why some cases of mobilization lead to renewed protest and unexpected regime challenges and other cases it builds regime support. To understand these different outcomes, this project shifts focus to protest legacies: their sustained effects on regime legitimation strategies, societal capacity to resist, and future regime development. To date, little research has been done to examine the role of state narratives and disinformation following protest and its effect on public opinion. This project develops a Rapid Response Toolkit to study protest legacies in authoritarian states, highlighting the role of information politics. Protest spread as grievances evolved to include political frustration and, in some places, peaceful protest gave way to riots. Initially the regime offered policy concessions, but when protest continued, the state turned to repression. The project uses Toolkit measures to track top-down strategies to restore order and citizens' reactions to regime efforts to restore order. This new approach to studying legacies will provide a basis for understanding the emergence of new protest cycles and continued regime instability. This project breaks new ground on the study of large-scale protest by moving beyond the question of whether protests result in regime change to analyzing the viability of state strategies in response to mass mobilization. It uses a three-person leader-follower signaling game, which enables the testing of propositions from two broad approaches in the existing literature: (1) the State-centric Approach, which draws from the literature on authoritarian state capacity and characterizes protest as a crisis that the state must address to reestablish control, and (2) the Protest Accumulation Model, drawn from social movement studies. Autocratic states can react to protest by attempting to bolster their legitimacy through institutional reform, policy change and by constructing and reconstructing narratives about the protest events and the state's response to these events. Individuals react by accepting or rejecting state narratives to different degrees, affecting future societal protest capacity. The PIs' leader-follower game predicts those responses. Utilizing recent mass mobilizations, the project develops a Rapid Response Toolkit to enable scholars to study protest legacies in authoritarian states, highlighting the role of information politics. The toolkit travel across protest contexts to build a comparative data set of protest legacies, defined as: state narratives about events, state policy change to respond to protest, and social attitudes and capacity for renewed protest. As mass mobilization in non-democratic countries becomes more common, an understanding of legacies is critical to predict regime durability, market disruptions, and future conflict. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.