Legitimacy and Protest Participation under Authoritarianism

Can individual participation in the 2011 Arab uprisings be explained in terms of low regime legitimacy, as has been frequently assumed? While many scholars have suggested political protests to constitute a concern to authoritarian regimes, there are few studies that actually examine protest participation under authoritarianism. In our article, we attempt to partially fill this research gap by posing the question of whether individuals are really motivated by a sense of de-legitimation to engage in political protest – or whether their decision to protest is better explained by other factors like economic grievances, political efficacy, or embeddedness in mobilizing structures. Using innovative empirical evidence from a survey (n=1638) conducted at public universities in Egypt and Morocco two years after the anti-regime protests in 2011, we systematically test the influence of legitimacy beliefs on protest participation against the background of competing theories from the field of contentious politics. In doing so, we attempt to bridge the micro-macro link between individual legitimacy beliefs and specific strategies of regime legitimation. Our data indicate that legitimacy does indeed account for participation in the 2011 protests. Yet, the influence of legitimacy is more complex than often assumed. As we demonstrate, legitimation occurs with respect to different objects: the political community on the one hand, and regime institutions and authorities on the other. These different objects of legitimacy have an independent effect on protest participation; moreover they are related to different motivations. Our results show that whereas declining legitimacy of the political institutions and authorities significantly increases the probability of having participated in the 2011 protests among Moroccan students, there was no significant relationship in the Egyptian case. Here, the identification with (unfulfilled) legitimacy claims relating to the political community – specifically anti-Western nationalism – significantly increases the probability of having participated in the protests.