The Causes and Consequences of Government Concessions to Protests

Abstract

Political street protests are a prominent form of political participation worldwide that transcends political regimes and ideologies. When governments give in to protesters' demands and grant concessions, these concessions are often assumed to indicate a protest's success and end. This is, however, not always the case. I argue that we need to take into account that governments cannot be certain their concession will satisfy protesters, and protesters cannot be certain about their success. Reconsidering governments' incentives to grant concessions, I conceptualize concessions as merely ambiguous signals of success and ask what the causes of such concessions are. Further, since concessions might be ineffective at ending protests, I ask what the consequences of concessions are. To study these questions, I contribute four empirical papers.

Investigating the causes of concessions, I conducted survey experiments with politicians in Belgium and Sweden. Paper 1 shows that politicians are most likely to concede to peaceful protests unless they expect their voters to be present, which makes them more tolerant of protesters' disruptive tactics. When protests are large, they are likely to talk within their party about the protest but also police it. In paper 2, I find that shared policy preferences between politicians and protesters increase politicians' willingness to concede to protesters. Priors toward the legitimacy of protests, however, influence this willingness. Regarding the consequences of concessions, in paper 3, Sebastian Hellmeier and I find that protests in authoritarian states are likely to continue after government concessions. We discuss these findings in the light of credible commitment problems between the state and protesters. In paper 4, Simon Gren and I show that concessions in the form of responsive withdrawals of unpopular policies are not electorally rewarded by Swedish voters. This points towards a challenge for incumbents when choosing whether to concede.