Post-election Protests Research Articles

Shocks to the System: Electoral Manipulation, Protests and the Evolution of Political Trust in Russia

Abstract How do electoral manipulation and resulting anti-fraud protests influence political trust in non-democratic contexts? I leverage the plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of a series of original surveys fielded on nationally representative samples in Russia to understand the impact of political shocks – particularly allegations of electoral fraud and post-election protests – on the evolution of trust in political institutions and individuals. This study demonstrates that allegations of excessive, blatant electoral fraud decrease trust in the autocrat. However, trust rebounds following attendant post-election protests. Finally, I examine the conditional impacts of fraud and protest on trust, finding that updating occurs primarily among those with weak political affiliation.

Electoral manipulation and postelectoral protests in Latin America

AbstractWhat is the relationship between electoral manipulation and postelection protests in Latin America? The political science literature has traditionally expected that election manipulation can lead to postelection demonstrations, but the research has not dealt much with how the elections were manipulated. This study aims to fill this gap. An analysis of 221 elections in Latin America between 1980 and 2020 shows that the relationship between electoral manipulation and postelection protests is far more complex than conventional explanations suggest. The results show that pre‐election manipulation does not increase the likelihood of postelection protests. Regarding manipulation during elections, it appears that citizens of Latin American countries are susceptible to administrative fraud. Contrary to previous studies, intimidation and vote buying also have no effect.

The Dynamics of Pro-Government Labour Mobilisation in Cambodia

Following the 2013 electoral setback and post-election protests, the ruling Cambodian People’s Party has pursued policy concessions to mobilise support from workers in the garment industry. This article examines the role of government-aligned unions in vote mobilisation. It is argued that despite their under-performance in the 2013 election, government-aligned unions retain the trust of the Cambodian People’s Party leadership and continue to play a vital role in facilitating co-optation by communicating public policies and political messages to workers, influencing the minimum wage determination process, and delivering free healthcare services. This article contributes to the growing literature on the Cambodian People’s Party’s post-2013 adaptation and the broader literature which often focuses on labour unions in single-party regimes.

W wirze historii – człowiek na tle wydarzeń przełomowych. Obraz protestów w 2020 r. we współczesnej literaturze białoruskiej na przykładzie wybranych opowiadań z tomu „Ператрус у музэі” Alhierda Bacharewicza

The article is devoted to the protests after the falsified presidential elections in Belarus in 2020 on the example of a collection of stories by Alhierd Bakharevich “A Police Search in the Museum”. Particular attention is paid to the creation of heroes, as well as the entanglement of the individual in history. The characters are divided into two groups: ordinary people who, despite their fear, decided to participate in demonstrations, and people struggling with the hardships of everyday existence, who, despite their lack of political involvement, become the subject of interest of representatives of the authoritarian power. The collection of stories, published in 2023, introduces a new direction in contemporary Belarusian prose related to protests. The analyzed work has not yet been the subject of in-depth reflection in literary studies. A traditional comparative analysis was used, where the decisive criterion was the positioning in relation to the role of executioner – victim. The aim of the article is to point out that the heroes of social protests were ordinary people who were pushed into action by their disagreement over the open violation of freedom of choice and the inability to decide on their fate, or the brutality of the representatives of the authorities. In the stories, there are characters expressing both individual and collective experience. The created characters and their adventures are therefore a literary record of events related to the post-election protests and everyday existence. The analysis proved that in the image of the protests, special attention was paid to a man and the role of history in his life. The characters created are ordinary people, representatives of various professions and social classes. These are not individuals whose character traits would make them stand out from society. These are average people who are unable to accept the actions of the authorities any longer. The past is largely absent, as it is only marginally remembered. Such an approach allows us to emphasize the role of ongoing events and indicates that they determine a person’s life.

Ending civil wars through fraudulent elections

Abstract Previous research finds a positive association between electoral fraud and post-election protests, violence, and civil conflict. This article contends that the effect of electoral fraud on peace can be heterogeneous. I investigate elections after civil wars that stalemated. My contribution is to present a theory and suggestive evidence that, in this context, electoral fraud by unpopular incumbents can be peace-promoting. An important policy implication is that international efforts to prevent electoral fraud (e.g. electoral observers), in this specific setting, may increase the odds that a civil war continues.

Why do post-election protests occur?

Why do post-election protests occur?

Post-election protests in Belarus as a tool of political technology. Working hypothes

The author analyzes the course of the elections in Belarus in 2020 and the socio-political protests caused by election fraud. On the basis of the anomalies noted in the activities of the security service of the Republic of Belarus the author puts forward a hypothesis about the possible involvement of the Russian secret services in provoking the post-election crisis in order to reduce the margin of political maneuver for the Lukashenka regime.

A Self-Critical Public: Cumulation of Opinion on Belarusian Oppositional YouTube before the 2020 Protests

YouTube-based discussions are a growing area of academic attention. However, we still lack knowledge on whether YouTube provides for forming critical publics in countries with no established democratic tradition. To address this question, we study commenting to Belarusian oppositional YouTube blogs in advance of the major wave of Belarusian post-election protests of 2020. Based on the crawled data of the whole year of 2018 for six Belarusian political videoblogs, we define the structure of the commenters’ community, detect the core commenters, and assess their discourse for aggression, orientation of dialogue, direction of criticism, and antagonism/agonism. We show that, on Belarusian YouTube, the commenters represented a genuine adversarial self-critical public with cumulative patterns of solidarity formation and find markers of readiness for the protest spillover.

Reaction of the Byelorussian Exarchate and the Roman Catholic Church to the August 2020 post-election protests in Byelorussia

In August 2020, the presidential elections took place in Byelorussia, which, according to official data, were won by A. G. Lukashenko by a wide margin. The announcement of the preliminary election results provoked a protest reaction of the opposition forces, who declared the results to be falsified and mobilized part of the Byelorussian population for mass street protests. The authorities deemed these actions illegal and used force to suppress them. This gave the opposition and protesters grounds to criticize the authorities with renewed vigor, accusing them of violence and infringement of political freedoms. The representatives of the Orthodox Church (the Byelorussian Exarchate of the Moscow Patriarchate) as well as of the Roman Catholic Church in Byelorussia reacted to the situation in the country, which caused a significant resonance in Byelorussia itself and abroad. The Byelorussian Exarchate did not support any of the conflicting sides, whereas Metropolitan Pavel, patriarchal exarch, unambiguously advocated the soonest cessation of the civil confrontation. At the same time, a few representatives of the clergy of the Byelorussian Exarchate publicly took the side of the protestors, including Archbishop Artemy of Grodno, but their statements were supported neither by the Synod of the Exarchate nor by the absolute majority of its bishops. The Roman Catholic Church, which has considerably smaller congregations in Byelorussia, also called for an end to the confrontation, but at the same time was much more immersed in the political agenda, poorly concealing its support for the opposition and protesters; the head of the Byelorussian Catholics at that time, Metropolitan T. Kondrusievicz, indirectly sympathized with the opposition as well. Despite the actual difference in the two churches' attitudes to the political situation, they both similarly appealed to spirituality and faith as a means of overcoming the conflict.

Planned Power Transition and Unexpected Crisis: Russian Responses to Belarusian Post-Election Protests

Abstract This Policy Insight article aimed to review Russia’s policies toward Belarus since the outbreak of the post-election protests. Russia tries to minimise the impacts of the crisis in Belarus to prevent the possibilities of the redistribution of power when it faces the “2024 problem”.

The Impact of Pre-Election Protests in Electoral Autocracies: The Case of Hong Kong’s Anti-ELAB Movement

Scholars of electoral autocracies accord far more attention to post-election protests than pre-election ones, as the former have the potential to trigger a regime transition. We argue that pre-election protests can have a significant effect on election outcomes. In particular, they are likely to deepen social cleavages along two dimensions: age and immigrant status. The 2019 social unrest in Hong Kong provides a unique opportunity to evaluate the electoral impact of pre-election protests. Comparing public opinion data related to the 2019 and 2015 District Council elections, we find strong empirical support for our argument, as immigrant status and age are strong predictors of voting choices and voter turnout. Our findings imply that exposure to democratic protests may not help in bridging the gap in political attitudes between immigrants and natives.

How Feminist is the Belarusian Revolution? Female Agency and Participation in the 2020 Post-Election Protests

Belarusian women stand at the forefront of post-election protests. Their participation is seen as unprecedented and is often perceived as a “revolution with a female face.” It did not start as a feminist project, however, but rather as a reaction to mass-scale arrests of male participants during the first days of protests. At the same time, is it possible to characterize female involvement in women's chains of solidarity and then regular Saturday demonstrations as a “feminist project” when one takes into account the usage of traditional feminine images and feminine aesthetics during the protests? On the other hand, even the symbolic subversion of patriarchal stereotypes present on the posters seems to have its limits when violence is inflicted by the representatives of special military forces. This essay will examine the agentic nature of female protests and the ways of expressing dignity in times when a basic sense of security is lacking. I will look at situational individual acts of agency and how these acts characterize female participants of the protests as a group that is aware of its resources and power. The text will be based on the analysis of media discourse and visual materials.

The Anatomy of Impatience: Exploring Factors behind 2020 Labor Unrest in Belarus

The wave of labor unrest that accompanied Belarusian post-election protests had no precedents in the country's independent history or recent post-Soviet political protest mobilizations. These protests challenge the prevalent trend in the current literature on the post-Soviet working class to stress its weakness in terms of organization, as well as structural and material resources. This article relies on a database of workplace-related protest events (August 10–September 30) and a selection of statements, interviews, and social media discussions among participants of the protests, in order to explain this unexpected activation of the seemingly passive Belarusian working class. The author hypothesizes that it was the vagueness of the Belarusian opposition's ideology and workers’ participation in the broader protest movement that helped them overcome the challenges of suppressed voice, bureaucratic despotism, and atomization. These mobilizing factors, however, limit the further development of autonomous labor organizations and their democratizing impact.

The Drowning-out Effect: Voter Turnout, Uncertainty, and Protests

Conventional wisdom suggests that high turnout in a free and fair election is desirable; it might signify proper representation, help the government identify and address social discontent, and hence reduce the risk of protests. In this paper, I demonstrate that this intuition does not necessarily hold. By extending a bargaining theory, I hypothesize that high turnout “drowns out” the voices of dissenters, creates uncertainties over the social discontent, and thus causes post-election protests. I test this hypothesis using election-day rainfall deviation as an instrumental variable for turnout and apply it to a new constituency-level dataset of Indian elections. I also extend a new design-based method, called near-far matching, that makes the causal comparison more powerful, robust, and explicit. The result shows that higher turnout increases the occurrence of protests. This finding implies that electoral democracy can be inherently imperfect as a conflict resolution mechanism.

БІЛОРУСЬКІ ПРОТЕСТИ 2020 У КОНТЕКСТІ ДОСЛІДЖЕННЯ КОНФЛІКТНИХ ПРОЦЕСІВ НА ПОСТРАДЯНСЬКОМУ ПРОСТОРІ

The article presents in abstract form the results of the initial historical analysis of the Belarusian protests of 2020 in the context of similar processes in the post-Soviet space. The preconditions and reasons for the mass demonstrations are shown: structural problems and the Ukrainian events of 2014 led to the stagnation of the Belarusian economy; confidence in the election results in society declined with each election campaign; the new generation of Belarusians had incomprehensible values, which were preserved and imposed on the society by the authorities. There were also several triggers of protests: the peculiarities of the strategy of the Belarusian leadership in the context of the cavid virus pandemic Kavid19 reduced the authority of the government; and the inconsistency of the official and actual results of the vote, the brutality of the dispersal of the first post-election protests caused mass outrage. Authorities considered and still consider the foreign factor to be the main reason for the protests. Many politicians and experts support the theory of Russian interference in Belarus. Solidarity of Belarusians is a new phenomenon of Belarus in recent history. In many respects it was able to manifest itself thanks to new forms of communication in society and fresh creative forms of activity: a chain of solidarity, walks and marches on avenues and streets, actions in residential areas, etc. The activity of women, pensioners and workers shows a change in their role in the political life of post-Soviet countries. And the support of the protests of other traditional and new professional groups testifies to the nationwide nature of the demonstrations. The lack of obvious socio-economic demands makes it possible to classify the Belarusian protests as political democratic revolutions, which can be conditionally called “Revolutions of Dignity”. The most important result of the Belarusian protests is the discovery of the world of the Belarusian political nation. Despite the polarization and a certain division in society, there is a clear general demand for the sovereignty of Belarus by supporters of S. Tikhanovskaya and A. Lukashenko. Now all political forces will have to reckon with the factor of existence and active participation in the political process of the Belarusian political nation.

Fraud, grievances, and post-election protests in competitive authoritarian regimes

Why does election fraud trigger protest in the aftermath of some competitive authoritarian elections but not others? It is often argued that post-election protests occur when information about fraud confirms and reinforces mass grievances against the regime. However, grievances are not universal in autocracies. By focusing on whether government spending primarily benefits the ruling coalition or the masses—thereby affecting economic inequality and mass grievances—the theoretical argument in this article demonstrates how fraud both can lead to post-election protests and work in the autocratic government's favor. I find evidence for the theoretical argument in an analysis of 628 competitive elections in 98 authoritarian regimes (1950–2010). More broadly, the article advances our understanding of competitive elections in autocracies by focusing on how autocratic governments pursue multiple election strategies to promote regime stability and how combinations of strategies affect popular mobilization.

Methods of Election Manipulation and the Likelihood of Post-Election Protest

AbstractThe risk of popular protest is one of the few deterrents against election manipulation in authoritarian regimes and unconsolidated democracies, but why are some fraudulent elections met with popular protest while others are not? We use data from elections in 108 countries, from 1980 to 2004, to show that the regime’s choice of election manipulation tactics affects the likelihood of post-election protest. Leaders signal their strength and resources by manipulating elections, but some manipulation tactics send stronger signals than others. We find that opposition groups are more likely to protest when relatively cheap administrative fraud is employed, but not when more costly forms of manipulation – extra-legal mobilization and voter intimidation – are used. This study demonstrates the importance of accounting for variation in electoral manipulation tactics, and the information communicated by those tactics, in explaining post-election protest and the stability of electoral authoritarian and newly democratic regimes.

Human Rights Violations and Post-election Protest

How do human rights violations affect post-election protest? Until recently, post-election protests have been explained primarily by election-related factors such as the level of manipulation and the quality of electoral institutions. We argue that there are three dimensions along which human rights violations influence post-election protest: (1) the physical cost to protesters, (2) the ability to connect the violation to an election outcome, and (3) the ability to connect the repressive action to the government. Using this framework, we identify political imprisonment as the physical integrity right violation most likely to increase the probability of post-election protest. We test our hypotheses empirically with data on all national-level elections in the world between 1982 and 2012. We find that political imprisonment, a violation easily connected to government action and election outcomes, and less costly physically than other physical integrity rights violations, increases the probability of post-election protest.

Legitimising Victories: Electoral Authoritarian Control in Russia’s Gubernatorial Elections

We explore the evolution of the Kremlin’s election control strategy in response to the reintroduction of gubernatorial elections in 2012. Our analysis focuses on the evolution of four tools used to engineer electoral competition: auxiliary institutions, subnational punishment regimes, ballot construction, and turnout manipulation. We argue that election managers deploy these mechanisms to maximise victories for state-sponsored candidates while minimising the possibility for post-election protest. The analysis demonstrates that electoral manipulation presents conflicting incentives for the Kremlin and its regional officials. It also shows the critical role that Russia’s systemic opposition plays in the electoral management system and regime stability.

From built to performed space: post-election protests in Tehran

ABSTRACTThis paper redefines the protest space as a performed liminal space that is topologically constituted. The production of protest space is examined through the narrations of people and participants during the post-election protests in Iran in 2009. It is well established that social exchanges are manifested in very diverse platforms, from new media to urban public spaces; this paper particularly argues that there is a topological relationship between all manifestations of protest. In other words, the protest space is articulated as a topological space, in which the protest can unfold in its physical, social, mental, and temporal capacities. The discussions deal with the complexity of spatial manifestations of protest. On one hand, the protest is discussed within the theoretical framework of ritual, showing that the protest is a temporal/liminal space. This framework helps not only to integrate spatial and temporal dimensions of protest, but also to avoid problematic conventional understanding of crowds. On the other hand, the protest space is articulated as a performed space, explaining how the protest space and collective performance are co-excited.