Justification of violence, ideological preferences and exposure to protests: Causal evidence from the 2019 Chilean social unrest

In this article we contribute to the dialogue between the social movements and public opinion fields by studying the causal effect of spatial and temporal proximity to protest events in which there was police repression over people’s willingness to justify violent actions against police forces. Our setting is the Chilean social uprising, a wave of massive protests that took place in Chile between late October 2019 and approximately February 2020. This is an important topic as citizen grievances against police actions can undermine the legitimacy of the government that controls police forces and brutal repression has triggered revolutionary movements that end up overthrowing governments. We employ a differences-in-difference research design that combines panel survey data with georeferenced data about protest events with repression occurring in the spatial and temporal vicinity of survey respondents. Our estimates show a positive and statistically significant effect of proximity to protests with repression. We also show that the effect of protests is not homogeneous but varies greatly across groups with different political ideologies. There is a strong and positive effect among centrists, but a negligible one for leftists and rightists. We seek to explain this intriguing pattern.