Perceptions, Contagion, and Civil Unrest

Abi-Nassif, Christophe ; Islam, Asif Mohammed ; Lederman, Daniel

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: CIVIL RESISTANCE;    CITIZEN PERCEPTIONS;    NONVIOLENT UPRISING;    CONFLICT;    DEMOCRACY;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-9416
RP-ID  :  WPS9416

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

This paper investigates the empiricalrelationship between citizens' perceptions of economicand political conditions and the incidence of nonviolentuprisings. Perceptions are measured by aggregatingindividual-level data from regional barometer surveys. Themain results show that negative perceptions of politicalconditions -- proxied by the share of the population that isgenerally dissatisfied with the way democracy works -- havea significant positive effect on the number of protests andstrikes. Negative perceptions of economic conditions do notseem to be significantly related to the latter. Thisgenerally holds across a large sample of countries and isparticularly the case for Western and Central Europeancountries as well as high-income countries. In developingeconomies, however, social protests appear to be driven bydissatisfaction with economic and political conditions. Theheterogeneous effects of perceptions on uprisings acrossgeography and income groups, however, are not robust andsusceptible to changes in estimators and modelspecification. In particular, the international contagion ofprotests eliminates this international heterogeneity,implying that the incidence of uprisings in nearby countriestends to generate protests at home through its effect onperceptions related to political conditions in high-incomecountries. Overall, the effect of perceptions aboutpolitical conditions, along with protest contagion, isrobust to the inclusion of numerous control variables thatcapture actual economic conditions and the quality ofgovernance across countries. The results are also robust tothe use of seemingly valid instrumental variables,alternative count-data estimators, and sample composition.