Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Under what conditions do riotous-violent protests increase the likelihood of protest success? The protest literature has largely found that riotous-violent protests (RVPs) are not effective. However, a burgeoning literature contradicts these findings. We extend this literature by exploring how waves of RVPs increase the likelihood of protest success. Protesters learn from past protest-government response dyads, which reduces the costs of continued protest in the face of repression. The temporal accumulation of riotous-violent protests exhausts the resources and collective will of the regime to continually hold out on protester demands. Thus, as the number of RVPs increases in a country-year, we expect there to be a coinciding increase in instances of government accommodation. Furthermore, we argue that democracy conditions the relationship between waves of RVPs and protest success. We conduct a cross-national observational data analysis of 119 countries from 1990 to 2019 using data from the Mass Mobilization Project. Our results support both of our hypotheses.
Source: Democratization
Authors: Deren Onursal, Adam Hobbs, Catherine Wells
Institution: University of California, Riverside
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4391337183