March 2005: parliamentary elections as a catalyst of protests

Abstract

Analyzing political opportunity structure in both the long and short terms, this article focuses specifically on the trigger effect of elections that provided the political space for oppositional leaders to frame their grievances. The emerging framework of understanding mobilization in the coloured revolutions combines stolen elections as a motivating trigger; an incumbent weakened by succession crisis and disunity of his power base; the semi-authoritarian character of pre-revolutionary politics; an opposition able to unite despite their inevitable differences and potentially important international factors. The specific mechanisms that translated stolen elections into mass demonstrations, succession crisis into a defeat of the incumbent and foreign example into a spillover effect, are not yet perfectly understood, and nor are their outcomes. The implications of how stolen and manipulated elections differ from each other are explored.