Mass mobilisation and regime change: Evidence from a new measure of mobilisation for democracy and autocracy from 1900 to 2020

Mass mobilisation is an important driver of political change. While some citizens organise collective action in favor of more democratic institutions, others take to the streets to support authoritarian leaders or non-democratic forms of governance. While protests led to regime change in Sudan and Armenia, similar movements did not produce tangible results in Belarus or Hong Kong. At the same time, we have also seen citizens on the streets in support of dictatorships – as in North Korea, Syria, or Venezuela – or in favor of reforms undermining democratic rule such as in Brazil or Turkey. What is the role of mass mobilisation in stabilising or changing a political regime? 

In this paper, Sebastian Hellmeier and Michael Bernhard (University of Florida) introduce latent measures of pro-democratic and pro-autocratic mass mobilisation using expert assessments for 170 polities from 1900-2020. The data allows researchers to trace patterns in mass mobilisation over time, across regions and regime types. Hellmeier and Bernhard use the new data to systematically analyse the relationship between both types of mobilisation and regime change. While the findings of the large literature on contentious democratic politics was confirmed, an analysis of autocratic mobilisation allows researchers to help understand the controversy in the literature on “bad” civil society. The authors' empirical analysis shows that mass mobilisation in favor of autocracy negatively affects democracy and reduces the likelihood of democratisation. Their results suggest that the extant literature’s focus on mobilisation 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.