Learning to Repress: Authoritarian Learning in the Arab Uprisings

Learning to Repress: Authoritarian Learning in the Arab Uprisings When and how did political learning take place among Arab autocrats during the 2011-12 Arab uprisings? This Paper builds on existing diffusion models, including information cascades, to theorize about patterns of authoritarian responses to mass popular protest. Using a unique cross-sectional data set of daily protest events and government responses to protest throughout 2011 in twelve Arab countries, the paper argues that political learning was central to government choices in how to respond to mass protest. The timing of the initial mass protests, in relation to those in other Arab countries, conditioned government responses based on the observed choices and experiences of other Arab governments. As protests spread to new countries in the initial weeks and months of 2011, cross-country government learning led governments to coordinate around strategies of violent repression, targeting protests earlier and earlier as time went on. The extent of the repression in an individual country is a function of the interaction between the degree of civil liberties in the country prior to 2011, the scale of the protests, and the relative timing of the initial mass protests compared with those in other Arab countries. The Paper thus extends existing democratic and protest diffusion models into the realm of authoritarian repression.