Violence, what is it good for? Waves of riotous-violent protest and democracy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Under what conditions do riotous-violent protests increase the likelihood of protest success? The protest literature has largely found that riotous-violent protests (RVPs) are not effective. However, a burgeoning literature contradicts these findings. We extend this literature by exploring how waves of RVPs increase the likelihood of protest success. Protesters learn from past protest-government response dyads, which reduces the costs of continued protest in the face of repression. The temporal accumulation of riotous-violent protests exhausts the resources and collective will of the regime to continually hold out on protester demands. Thus, as the number of RVPs increases in a country-year, we expect there to be a coinciding increase in instances of government accommodation. Furthermore, we argue that democracy conditions the relationship between waves of RVPs and protest success. We conduct a cross-national observational data analysis of 119 countries from 1990 to 2019 using data from the Mass Mobilization Project. Our results support both of our hypotheses.