Turnover and turnout: long and short term effects of revolutions on political engagement

How do revolutions affect the turnout? How do they impact citizens' emotions and their propensity to vote? Previous investigations demonstrated that there are associations between participation in protests and elections. Participation in protests increases political engagement. However, in countries with recent mass protests that had led to governmental turnover turnout declined. The function of elections is altered, it has been replaced by revolutions which lead to an unscheduled change of leadership. Revolutions take place on the national level and the decision to vote is on the individual, one of the factors that interferes and mediates the decision-making is emotions.Theories of political psychological argue that the feeling of threat, which presumably occurs during the revolution, leads to anger or fear. Such emotions have mobilizing and demobilizing effects. However, in countries with repeated revolutions, such effects would differ from conventional democracies. The same threat has occurred several times. Thus, we would distinguish between the long-term and short-term effects. The specificity of color-revolution countries allows us to test these assumptions in Kyrgyzstan. In this paper, I study the potentially distinct repercussions of revolutions on (i) emotions and propensity to vote and (ii) the effect of frequency on political efficacy and voting. Such a setup enables testing whether revolutions explain the volatility of the turnout through the short- and long-term effects. I study these assumptions based on observational cross-country data and, survey experiments in Kyrgyzstan. The goal is to test how the iterative events affect the respondents' propensity to engage in politics. The treatment groups are primed on past events and are asked to recall any emotional associations with the revolution. The bigger question that this paper answer is why revolutions fail to democratize in the long run. It could be explained by the people’s feeling of being demotivated to participate in politics.