A Dynamic Model of Protest: People Power or a One Shot Deal

Citation:
Meirowitz, Adam, and Joshua Tucker. "A Dynamic Model of Protest: People Power or a One Shot Deal." American Journal of Political Science (2012).

Abstract:

In late 2004, Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” captured international attention as an example of citizens seizing control of their country’s future. Recently, though, the seemingly unthinkable happened in Ukraine: Viktor Yanukovich – whose blatant attempts to steal the 2004 Ukrainian presidential elections using all manners of electoral fraud gave rise to the Orange Revolution – was elected president of Ukraine and inaugurated with almost no popular response. These events present a puzzle: why were citizens willing to bear the cost of protesting in 2004 to ensure that Yanukovich not become president, only to shrug their collective shoulders at his victory five years later? We consider this puzzle from a theoretical perspective, modeling the effect of protest at one point in time on the likelihood of protest in the future. The model provides numerous predictions for why we might observe a “one shot deal” scenario whereby protest occurs in the first period but not the second, but the most important novel insight concerns the learning process of citizens. We suggest that citizens may not only be discovering the type of their new government - as most previous models of adverse selection assume - but rather may also be learning about the universe of potential governments in their country. In doing so, we expand the formal literature on the adverse selection problem in selecting governments in two important new directions: conditions under which removing governments is costly, and conditions under which the underlying distribution of possible government types is imperfectly known.

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