Protests

Davide Cantoni, Andrew Kao, David Yang and Noam Yuchtman

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Citizens have long taken to the streets to demand change, expressing political views that may otherwise be suppressed. Protests have produced change at local, national, and international scales, including spectacular moments of political and social transformation. We document five new empirical patterns describing 1.2 million protest events across 218 countries between 1980 and 2020. First, autocracies and weak democracies experienced a trend break in protests during the Arab Spring. Second, protest movements also rose in importance following the Arab Spring. Third, protest movements geographically diffuse over time, spiking to their peak before falling off. Fourth, a country’s year-to-year economic performance is not strongly correlated with protests; individual values are predictive of protest participation. Fifth, the United States, China, and Russia are the most overrepresented countries in academic studies. We discuss each pattern’s connections to the existing literature and anticipate paths for future work.

Keywords: protests; information technology; movements; political participation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 P00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2024-08-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis, nep-ict, nep-pol and nep-soc
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Published in Annual Review of Economics, 22, August, 2024, 16(1), pp. 519 - 543. ISSN: 1941-1383

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/123527/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Protests (2024)
Working Paper: Protests (2023)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:123527

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