Protest Campaigns and Competitive Authoritarianism: Evidence from Serbia Under Vučić

This paper examines how competitive authoritarianism facilitates protest campaigns and how the protests in turn influence authoritarian rule. Competitive authoritarian regimes provide political opportunities for contentious challenges while producing grievances by the massive disruption of such opportunities, including the freedoms of media, association and assembly. This combustible mix may trigger protest campaigns which demonstrate that regime elites are vulnerable, become the focal point of their disparate rivals and may wrest concessions, such as policy reversals, dismissals of officials and defence of officially proclaimed freedoms. The long term, “constitutive” influence of protest campaigns includes the moulding of the identities, interests and capacities of authoritarian elites and opposition groups, and may result in government turnover, even regime change. I explore these theoretical propositions by tracing how large protest campaigns repeatedly undermined competitive authoritarian rule of Aleksandar Vučić in Serbia (2015-). Parallels are drawn with protest campaigns in Serbia under Slobodan Milošević and their consequences (1990-2000). Serbia is selected as an extreme case which may shed light on the links between competitive authoritarianism and protest campaigns in other relevant states, post-communist and others, with a lower level and impact of protest.