The Legacies of Revolutionary Failure

For many countries around the world, transition to democracy was preceded by costly, yet unsuccessful and often violently suppressed attempts at regime change. An influential scholarship has examined such events as critical junctures in the process for democratization, emphasizing how uprisings motivated government reform, or conversely authoritarian retrenchment. Public opinion, however, has remained one of the silent voices in this literature. As a result, we know comparatively little about how unsuccessful uprisings affect popular support for democratic forms of government. Do failed attempts at regime change highlight uncertainties about the quality of the opposition, thus galvanizing authoritarian rule? Or, do they instead signal that the government is willing to compromise the welfare of its citizens, thereby accelerating the erosion of public support for incumbents? This Paper takes a first step at addressing these questions. Combining a unique protest-event dataset with survey evidence collected during the 2011-12 Russian protest wave, I use an instrumental variables design to study how exposure to street unrest across regions affected support for non-democratic forms of government. Evidence suggests that the use of regime violence against protesters dampened overall feelings of political efficacy on the one hand and strengthened support for strong, yet little constrained forms of government able to maintain order and stability in the country on the other. These findings have several implications regarding the cognitive effects of protests and their consequences for democratic consolidation, which I hope to test in the future. Specifically, they suggest a trade-off between attitudinal support for democracy and preferences over street order and stability. Risk aversion and fear, instrumentally heightened by the use of regime violence, could have long-lasting effects on citizens’ overall feelings of efficacy, effectively compromising their ability to hold incumbents to account, even after transitions to fragile forms of democracy have taken place.