The role of pro-democratic protests in political liberalization: evidence from electoral autocracies

This paper assesses to what extent pro-democratic protests lead to political liberalization in electoral autocracies. Most of the literature demonstrates theoretically and quantitatively how the population solves the problem of collective action to mobilize in protests, as well as why electoral authoritarian regimes face higher rates of political unrest. Partial liberalization and democratic transitions have largely been attributed to opposition coordination and repetition of elections. However, to what extent protests can generate concrete impacts on greater political liberalization, and demonstrate it quantitatively, is not much explored in the literature. I argue that higher levels of protest increases the likelihood of liberalizing outcomes. This is due to the increasing costs of incumbent repression, strengthens opposition movements, and stimulates power-concession agreements. To test my hypothesis, I employ a fixed-effects model with 93 countries that still are or were electoral autocracies, from 1990 to 2021. The results indicate that an increase in protests is associated with better indices of political liberalization.