This paper examines how network ties between local social leaders influenced the diffusion of mass protests in an autocracy. We focus on the Protestant Church and the Peaceful Revolution in East Germany. To quantify the role of leader networks in protest diffusion, we compile biographical...

In an election, protest voters signal their discontent with the party they traditionally support in different ways. This paper examines a specific form of protest voting in which voters choose an anti-mainstream party over their true first preference, the mainstream party, as a way to signal...

Protest mobilisation and coordination require competences that extend beyond political leadership and communication. Technology, which has become a daily part of humanity, pushes protest leaders to obtain skills in navigating social media to achieve effective communication and leadership. Labour...

During recent crises in Europe, new heterogeneous protest movements have emerged that are difficult to label and classify. Existing studies suggest that the common denominator of these protesters is primarily the lack of political trust. Therefore, these new protest movements offer favorable...

Seit Jahresbeginn 2024 finden deutschlandweit Proteste gegen Rechtsextremismus großen Zulauf. Doch ist es tatsächlich eine "schweigende Mehrheit", die hier für Demokratie aufsteht? In diesem Policy Paper stellen wir die Ergebnisse einer Befragung dreier Protestveranstaltungen vor und...

Environmental degradation, ranging from air and water pollution to land degradation and climate change, often generates discontent and grievances among affected populations. Such dissatisfaction with living conditions can foster political unrest, as individuals may protest publicly to voice...

Do sudden weather disasters in cities of the Global South increase the likelihood of anti-government protests? In cities of the Global South, floods, storms, and landslides strain already fragile infrastructure, often leading to destruction and hardship. While urban residents occasionally...

We propose a theory of protest dynamics with heterogeneous protest technology and intensity. The ability to mobilize online reduces the likelihood of coordination failures at both the extensive (engagement) and intensive (violence) margins. Social media can initially help launch massive...

We examine individuals' decisions to attend Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations calling for less stringent COVID-19 public health measures (e.g., for swifter reopening of businesses) during the summer of 2020 in the US. We find that attending one type of protest strongly predicts...

Um die Treibhausgasneutralität bis 2045 zu erreichen, wird unter anderem erforderlich sein, dass die Industrie klimaneutrale Produktionsweisen entwickelt und umsetzt. Damit einher gehen gesellschaftliche Aushandlungsprozesse darüber, welche neuen Technologien eingesetzt werden und welche...

The Protestant missionaries started the trend to educate women in the 19th century China, paving Chinese women’s way into higher education and professional services. Using various measures of Protestant activities by 1920 and a hand-collected dataset of college students from 1928-1938, we show...

This paper develops a model to investigate the interaction between policymaking and strategic protest. Protesting citizens demand policy reforms by protesting against the status quo, but differ in their preference for the directions of the reform. The size of the protest informs policymaker...

Ethiopia’s recent experiment with a developmental state model delivered double-digit economic growth and significant expansion of public services for nearly two decades. However, a wave of violent protests that began in 2014 culminated in a leadership change and the termination of the...

We examine individuals' decision to attend Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations calling for less stringent public health measures to combat COVID-19 (e.g., for swifter reopening of businesses). Our analysis is facilitated by a unique staggered panel data set originally constructed to...

Verbraucherinnen und Verbraucher können durch ihr Konsumverhalten auf die Märkte Einfluss nehmen – sei es durch die bewusste Wahl oder Ablehnung bestimmter Produkte und Konsummuster, sei es durch lautstarken Protest, z.B. in Demonstrationen gegen den Klimawandel. Doch wie weit reicht die...

Previous studies have found a positive relationship between the youth and the educated with protest intensity, but the form that these protests take needs further research. We argue that students are a unique group, acting neither as an educated nor a young population, and three possible...

We examine individuals’ decisions to attend protests during the summer of 2020. Our analysis examines two simultaneous movements: Black Lives Matter along with protests calling for less stringent public health measures to combat the COVID-19 (e.g., for swifter reopening of businesses). Our...

We study the relative effectiveness of exit (divestment and boycott) and voice (engagement) strategies in promoting socially desirable outcomes in companies. We show that in a competitive world exit is less effective than voice in pushing firms to act in a socially responsible manner....

This paper studies how social media affect protest dynamics in China during 2009-2017. Based on 13.2 billion microblog posts, we use tweets and retweets to measure social media communication across cities and exploit its rapid expansion for identification. We find that despite strict government...

Can citizen-led protests lead to meaningful economic redistribution and nudge governments to increase redistributive efforts of fiscal resources? We study the effects of protests on fiscal redistribution using evidence from Nigeria. We digitized twenty-six years of public finance data from 1988...

Citizens political participation to protests is a crucial issue for any political system, whether democratic or autocratic. Political systems have different ways of dealing with citizens' protests, determining cost and benefit of public dissent, responding to public requests and allowing...

We develop a measure of a regime's tolerance for an action by its citizens. We ground our measure in an economic model and apply it to the setting of political protest. In the model, a regime anticipating a protest can take a costly action to repress it. We define the regime's tolerance as the...

We examine individuals' decision to attend Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations calling for less stringent public health measures to combat COVID-19 (e.g., for swifter reopening of businesses). Our analysis is facilitated by a unique staggered panel data set originally constructed to...

We examine individuals' decisions to attend protests during the summer of 2020. Our analysis examines two simultaneous movements: Black Lives Matter along with protests calling for less stringent public health measures to combat the COVID-19 (e.g., for swifter reopening of businesses). Our...