Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP9787
Authors: Dmitry Dagaev; Natalia Lamberova; Anton Sobolev; Konstantin Sonin
Abstract: There has been a wide-spread belief that elections with a wide franchise following removal of an oppressive dictator lead to establishment of a government that is not vulnerable to mass protest. At the same time, most of the post-World War II non-constitutional exits of recently-installed autocratic leaders were caused by elite coups, rather than popular protests. The recent experience of Egypt, where the democratic post-Mubarak government, a result of the Arab Spring, collapsed after having had almost uninterrupted protests since its first day in office, offers a striking counterexample to both of these patterns. We demonstrate that this is a general phenomenon: the same technological shock, arrival of social media, that makes the incumbent vulnerable, lays foundation for continuous instability of the subsequent democratic government. Our theoretical model, which incorporates protest into a Downsian framework, takes into account specific features of modern protests: the significant role of social media and the absence of the partisan or personalized leadership during popular unrest. Case studies of the Arab countries with and without large-scale protests corroborate our theoretical findings.
Keywords: Arab Spring; Autocracy; Collective Action; Regime Change; Social Media
JEL Codes: C42; D74; L96
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Social media (Z13) | Collective action (D70) |
| Collective action (D70) | Protests (D74) |
| Protests (D74) | Stability of new government (E63) |
| Social media (Z13) | Protests (D74) |
| Protests (D74) | New incumbent (Y20) |
| New incumbent (Y20) | Vulnerability to subsequent protests (D74) |
| Policy preferences of protesters (D72) | New incumbent (Y20) |
| New incumbent (Y20) | Stability of new government (E63) |