Contentious Regime Transformation in the Shadow of Nationalism

How do civil mobilization and ethnic nationalism shape regime transformation? Civil mobilization is often portrayed as a firewall against autocratization, but research on “uncivil society” shows that mass mobilization can also benefit autocratic leaders. Similarly, although nationalism was a historic engine of decolonization and democratization, it is increasingly associated with illiberal tendencies. However, the literature on regime transformation largely neglects the role of ethnic nationalism and its interactions with civil mobilization. To address these puzzles, I explore the connections between contentious action, nationalist ideologies, and autocratization. First, my conceptual framework disentangles the dynamics of autocratic transitions, relying on the distinction between vertical, horizontal, and diagonal accountability and on the interpretation of autocratization as “ethnocratization” – increased dominance of ethnic ingroups and discrimination of ethnic outgroups. My argument then centres on the long-term legacies of contentious tactics and ideologies shaping the critical junctures of state formation and democratization. Specifically, I focus on two variables: whether critical junctures are driven by civil resistance or not, and whether they are driven by dominant ethno-nationalist movements or not. These two axes identify four novel ideal types, which I label as “inclusionary”, “partisan”, “dormant”, and “exclusionary” critical junctures. These, I argue, leave different path-dependent legacies that explain the onset and modality of autocratization. I test this original theoretical contribution on newly collected data. I leverage large language models to systematically connect multiple quantitative sources on critical junctures to narrative information from two key text-based sources: the new OMG (Opposition Movements and Groups) project on mass mobilization and a yet unpublished database on dominant nationalism. This allows me to categorize all episodes of state formation and democratization occurring worldwide after 1946 along my two axes of interest. Overall, my large-N results suggest that whether and how regimes die crucially depends on how they are born.