When Triggers Cause Unrest: Explaining New Revolutions in the Post-Soviet Region

Can a revolution happen without long-term grievances and why do most protests catch us by surprise? To answer these questions, this paper develops further the “democracy by mistake” framework and attempts to determine what trigger events, resulting from incumbents’ blunders, generate instantaneous, sizeable, and consistent popular mobilization that may lead to regime change. For this purpose, on the basis of in-depth interviews, archival evidence, and openly available survey data, it compares the successes of Ukraine’s Euromaidan in 2013-14 and Armenia’s Velvet Revolution in 2018 to the inconclusive anti-corruption protests in Moldova in 2015-16. The paper argues that in Ukraine and Armenia, the trigger events came as "life-and-death" threats to the well-being of the citizens, who could quickly assign responsibility for these threats to the incumbents. Consequently, the Ukrainian and Armenian protesters wanted their incumbents to step down immediately, and were ready to invest a lot of time, material resources, and effort to reach their goals. The protests in Ukraine were galvanized by the dispersal of a peaceful student demonstration in favor of European integration, which had been abruptly delayed by the government, while in Armenia they were sparked by the incumbent’s decision to retain power for an indefinite time, despite his continuous promises to transfer it to a popular successor. In Moldova, the disappearance of 1 billon euros from the national banking system, however, was not enough for the protests to reach a critical mass. The corruption scandal did not come against a backdrop of expectations for serious anti-graft reforms, did not affect directly the citizens’ well-being, and was a very complex affair, which complicated blame assignment for ordinary citizens. This paper argues that trigger events capable of producing quick, sizeable, and consistent popular protests are not just “last straws”, since not all incumbents’ blunders can cause regime-changing popular mobilization. Such trigger events can be defined as transformative or revolutionary ones. The paper also discusses whether trigger events come as (new) information revelations and/or moral shocks, and to what degree their political impacts are contingent on the pre-existing levels of citizens’ satisfaction with the regime, on the identities of opposition parties, and on how such parties frame trigger events. Methodologically, this study offers a process tracing analysis based on interviews and secondary data. The interviewees include some leaders of the relevant civil society organizations and political parties, as well as experts, journalists, and activists that were directly involved in or monitored the protests. The secondary data include openly available survey results, in-depth and focus group interviews conducted with some participants of the protests.