Working Paper: NBER ID: w31617
Authors: Davide Cantoni; Andrew Kao; David Y. Yang; Noam Yuchtman
Abstract: Citizens have long taken to the streets to demand change, expressing political views that may otherwise be suppressed. Protests have produced change at local, national, and international scales, including spectacular moments of political and social transformation. We document five new empirical patterns describing 1.2 million protest events across 218 countries between 1980 and 2020. First, autocracies and weak democracies experienced a trend break in protests during the Arab Spring. Second, protest movements also rose in importance following the Arab Spring. Third, protest movements geographically diffuse over time, spiking to their peak, before falling off. Fourth, a country’s year-to-year economic performance is not strongly correlated with protests; individual values are predictive of protest participation. Fifth, the US, China, and Russia are the most over-represented countries by their share of academic studies. We discuss each pattern’s connections to the existing literature and anticipate paths for future work.
Keywords: protests; political change; social movements; Arab Spring; social media
JEL Codes: P0
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Trend break in protests during the Arab Spring (P27) | Change in protest mobilization (J62) |
| Proliferation of social media (O35) | Change in protest mobilization (J62) |
| Regime type (autocracies and weak democracies) (O17) | Protest organization within movements (D74) |
| Protest dynamics (D74) | Geographic diffusion of protest movements (P39) |
| Regime responses (P26) | Geographic diffusion of protest movements (P39) |
| Individual attitudes and social factors (D91) | Protest participation (D72) |