Protests in Defence of Democracy Exploring the Heterogeneous Mobilizing Effects of Democratic Erosion

Facing democratic erosion, when do people take to the streets to protest in defence of democracy? Since the early 2000s both electoral and liberal democracies have experienced a wave of democratically elected incumbents seeking to, and succeeding in, eroding key democratic rights, norms. While an extensive literature exists on how protests can drive democratization processes, much less is known about the role of collective direct action in episodes of democratic erosion. A vibrant civil society and a citizenry committed to democratic principles are often theorized to function as a bulwark against authoritarianism. However, systematic research on both if, and when, people will defend democracy is undeniably lacking. In this paper, I argue that democratic erosion affects both the opportunities and the motivation to engage in protests, and that these mechanisms have contradictory mobilizing effects. The opportunity to participate in direct collective action targeting the state is protected by democratic institutions and principles. As these are eroded, the opportunity to protest is constrained. Simultaneously, democratic erosion entails a loss of rights for citizens. Leveraging relative deprivation theory, I argue that this loss motivates contentious actions. Thus, democratic erosion both motivates citizens to protest and limit their opportunities to do so. Moreover, I expect erosion efforts targeting different aspects of democracy – capturing both electoral and liberal elements – to have heterogeneous affects on both opportunity and motivations. Grounded in Dahl’s conception of polyarchy and V-Dem’s further efforts, I thus disaggregate the measure of democracy to test the relationship between democratic erosion (along different democratic components) and mobilization in defence of democracy. Combining data on changes in quality of democratic components and data on anti-state protests in electoral and liberal democracies, I create a panel data set with near global scope covering the time period 1990-2020, and thus the entire “third wave of autocratization”. Implications of my theoretical framework are tested in a regression framework using country fixed-effects Poisson models. I find no evidence that democratic erosion is positively associated with increased protest activity. Some variation appears when disaggregating democratic erosion and looking at erosion targeting different democratic components. However, the vast majority of my findings suggest that democratic erosion fail to spur protests in defence of democracy. The results challenge the widely held assumption that citizens will defend democracy and function as a bulwark against authoritarianism. I suggest that parts of the explanation lie in the conflicting effects democratic erosion has on opportunity and motivation to engage in collective action. The findings have considerable implications for the theoretical and empirical understanding of democratic erosion, and how democracy may be preserved. Moreover, this paper offers an initial effort to link the emerging scholarship on democratic erosion with the established literature on contentious politics.