Perceptions, Contagion, and Civil Unrest
This paper investigates the empirical relationship between citizens' perceptions of economic and political conditions and the incidence of nonviolent uprisings. Perceptions are measured by aggregating individual-level data from regional barome...
| Main Authors: | , , |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2020
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/721471601383865869/Perceptions-Contagion-and-Civil-Unrest http://hdl.handle.net/10986/34554 |
| Summary: | This paper investigates the empirical
relationship between citizens' perceptions of economic
and political conditions and the incidence of nonviolent
uprisings. Perceptions are measured by aggregating
individual-level data from regional barometer surveys. The
main results show that negative perceptions of political
conditions -- proxied by the share of the population that is
generally dissatisfied with the way democracy works -- have
a significant positive effect on the number of protests and
strikes. Negative perceptions of economic conditions do not
seem to be significantly related to the latter. This
generally holds across a large sample of countries and is
particularly the case for Western and Central European
countries as well as high-income countries. In developing
economies, however, social protests appear to be driven by
dissatisfaction with economic and political conditions. The
heterogeneous effects of perceptions on uprisings across
geography and income groups, however, are not robust and
susceptible to changes in estimators and model
specification. In particular, the international contagion of
protests eliminates this international heterogeneity,
implying that the incidence of uprisings in nearby countries
tends to generate protests at home through its effect on
perceptions related to political conditions in high-income
countries. Overall, the effect of perceptions about
political conditions, along with protest contagion, is
robust to the inclusion of numerous control variables that
capture actual economic conditions and the quality of
governance across countries. The results are also robust to
the use of seemingly valid instrumental variables,
alternative count-data estimators, and sample composition. |
|---|