Mass Mobilization and Regime Change. Evidence From a New Measure of Mobilization for Democracy and Autocracy From 1900 to 2020

Abstract

Mass mobilization is an important driver of political change. While some citizens organize collective action in favor of more democratic institutions, others take to the streets to support authoritarian leaders or non-democratic forms of governance. In this paper, we introduce latent measures of pro-democratic and pro-autocratic mass mobilization using expert assessments for 170 polities from 1900-2020. The data allows us to trace patterns in mass mobilization over time, across regions and regime types. We use the new data to systematically analyze the relationship between both types of mobilization and regime change. While we confirm the findings of the large literature on contentious democratic politics, our analysis of autocratic mobilization allows us to help understand the controversy in the literature on “bad” civil society. Our empirical analysis shows that mass mobilization in favor of autocracy negatively affects democracy and reduces the likelihood of democratization. Our results suggest that the extant literature’s focus on mobilization generally was perhaps too blunt, and disaggregating the goals of the actors involved in contentious politics helps to understand how protest affects regime change in a more nuanced fashion.