The democratization process: An empirical appraisal of the role of political protest

Maria Marino, Paolo Li Donni (), Sebastiano Bavetta and Marco Cellini

European Journal of Political Economy, 2020, vol. 63, issue C

Abstract: This paper analyses the role of peaceful and violent protest in the democratization process. We interpret the democratization process as a sequence of phases so as to allow citizens' and elites' preferences for democracy to vary according to the particular phase that a country is experiencing. By doing so we jointly model the probability of protest and of moving through different phases of democracy taking into account time-constant and time-varying unobserved heterogeneity. In particular, we develop a multivariate finite mixture model that introduces a latent variable to capture unobservable factors. On a sample of 171 countries from 1971 to 2010, we provide evidence that protest matters in all phases of democratization, especially peaceful citizens’ demonstrations. On the contrary, violent protest has ambiguous consequences, as it favours initial democratic transitions but at the cost of threatening democratic consolidation. We also find that, after conditioning for economic and institutional controls, there is evidence of time-varying unobserved heterogeneity.

Keywords: Peaceful and violent protest; Democratization process; Unobserved heterogeneity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D74 P16 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:poleco:v:63:y:2020:i:c:s017626802030029x

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2020.101881

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