Violent and Nonviolent Uprisings in Authoritarian Regimes

Recently, comparative politics has taken an ‘authoritarian turn’, substantially improving our understanding of the factors that sustain and challenge nondemocratic regimes. As the events during the Arab Spring testify, one important source of authoritarian instability is popular upheavals, be they of a violent nonviolent character. However, only little cross-country quantitative research on the distribution, characteristics, and consequences of mass uprisings in authoritarian settings exists. The obvious reason for this neglect is to be found in the lack of good data. So far scholars have relied exclusively on the widely used, but also highly questionable, Banks (2001) dataset. This dataset provides information on occurrences of different types of popular upheavals, but it does not tell us anything about their intensity with regards to size and duration. Nonetheless, findings based on these data have been interpreted as evidence of how authoritarian regimes react to major uprisings. This paper makes use of the new NAVCO 2.0 dataset, which provides rich information on only the very large uprisings across a period of 50 years (1946-2006), coding the goals and character of the campaigns along with government responses. This allows us to, more thoroughly, test the relationship between mass uprisings and authoritarian stability. Taking our departure in a critique of Ulfelder’s (2005) article on contentious collective action in different types of authoritarian regimes, we show that many of the “truisms” regarding differences between authoritarian regimes in connection to the frequency and success of uprisings as well as government response cannot be corroborated. In fact, distinguishing between personalist, military, single party, and monarchic regimes is not very helpful if we are to understand the mechanisms at play. Rather, other regime distinctions, like the degree of exclusion and the strength of the coercive apparatus, show greater prominence when it comes to explaining regime responses and campaign successes.