An Agent-Based Model of the State-Dissident Nexus

This paper presents an agent-based model of political protest, developed from ethnographic interviews with dissidents in two repressive settings in the context of the Arab Spring (Egypt and Morocco; N=92). Previous qualitative analyses and related ethnographic interviews have established that dissidents in these settings are motivated by state repression combined with positive emotions of courage and hope about the outcome of dissident behavior. This brings in the individual perspective to more context-based explanations of protest behavior: While a range of theories exist about the conditions under which protest is more likely, few theories explain the variation between individuals within the same context in terms of their protest behavior. In this paper, we take the next step towards developing a new theory of protest behavior by investigating an agent-based model, where the rules of behavior of the model are derived from the qualitative analyses. We apply the model to examine theories on the state-dissident nexus, according to which dissidents are expected to respond to increasingly high levels of governmental repression by either decreasing their activity (the inverted-u hypothesis) or by retaliating (the backlash hypothesis). Consistent with the inverted-u hypothesis the simulations show that there is a positive relationship between repression and dissent where both increase, until a repression threshold is reached and dissent starts to decline. The model moreover adds to the literature by suggesting conditions under which dissent may increase as opposed to decrease: State interventions that weaken the protest infrastructure have a negative effect on dissent, whereas a certain level of protest participation ensures the continuation of dissent, even when repression levels are high and the protest infrastructure is weak. The model differentiates between online and offline state interventions on protest infrastructure to investigate the possibility of social media such as Facebook to bypass blocked offline mobilization channels.