Perceptions, Contagion, and Civil Unrest

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of citizens' perceptions of economic and political conditions on nonviolent uprisings. For a global sample of high-income (Europe) and developing economies (Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East and North Africa), on average, negative perceptions of political conditions have a significant positive effect on the number of anti-government protests and general strikes while negative perceptions of economic conditions do not, even after accounting for actual economic conditions and the quality of governance. This holds for European and high-income countries but not for developing economies where both economic and political perceptions matter. The international contagion of protests attenuates this regional heterogeneity, possibly implying that in Europe, the incidence of uprisings in nearby countries tends to generate protests at home through its effect on political perceptions. This invites the possibility of countries perennially facing vicious cycles of protests. Overall, the effects of political perceptions and protest contagion are robust to the inclusion of numerous control variables, seemingly valid instrumental variables, alternative count-data estimators, and sample composition.