The Anatomy of Resistance Campaigns

Why are some countries democracies while others are ruled by dictators? Why do some become democratic only to slide back to autocracy some years later? While most studies have focused on slow-moving economic and demographic factors, we look at the actors that actually organize resistance to authoritarian rule. Could it be that when resistance movements draw upon large, powerful organizations like trade unions, that democracy is more likely and more stable? What role does religious and ethnic diversity within revolutionary movements play in their success and the stability of democracy? Can these movements bridge diversity through alliances and by drawing upon social media networks? We examine these questions with dynamic new data on networks of organizations across Central America and Africa from 1990-2017, combined with the latest developments in the measurement of democracy, network analysis and statistical methods. Our results will help understand how the international community can support the actors most likely to drive changes to stable democracy.

The Anatomy of Resistance Campaigns project takes a new look at the causes of sustainable democratization by examining the organisations that participate in episodes of mass dissent. Recent studies show that democratization is often the product of mass, nonviolent mobilisation. However, episodes of mass mobilisation are treated as largely homogenous in existing research through proxies such as the size or duration of protests, while in reality they vary enormously and especially in terms of the organisations that participate. We argue that disaggregating episodes of mass mobilisation into their organisational components is a necessary step towards understanding democratization. Organisations mobilise people into dissent, bargain with regimes and participate in transitional regimes - yet how variations in these coalitions affect the prospects of democratization has not been examined in quantitative scholarship. We fill this gap by outlining a method for systematically identifying and recording the features of organisations that have participated in anti-government dissent in Africa and Central America from 1990-2017. We draw upon the explosion of events data collection in protest and conflict events, along with cutting-edge methods that draw upon web-scraping and social media usage. Our argument, contrary to much existing literature on protest and democratization, is that the diversity of interests encompassed in mass uprisings may create preferences for democracy but undermine the ability of movements to force long-term institutional changes. It is, rather, the embeddedness of organisations in quotidian networks and the networks among them that generates the long-term capacity to force and sustain democratic change. We use the new ARC data to test how the diversity, durability and unity of mass uprisings affects the prospects of sustainable democratization from mobilisation to regime regime, through transitional periods and consolidation.