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Долгосрочное влияние силы репрессий в онлайн- и офлайн-среде на численность участников поствыборных протестов. Кросс-страновое эмпирическое исследование
Although the relationship between state coercive measures
and protests has long been studied in Political Science, there are a number of
gaps in the modern research studies about the impact of repressions on street
protest activity. A serious flaw in these studies is their focus on the influence
of repressions on the existing protest campaigns, with little attention to their
long-term implications. The impact of repressions on the scale of protest and
number of protesters, as well as the role of the Internet as a factor mediating
the impact of state sanctions on protests, is understudied. The article attempts
to bridge these gaps.
The author has first examined theoretical arguments in support of three
possible forms of correlation between the severity of repressions and street
protest activity — negative, positive, and parabolic (n-shaped), after which he
tests relevant hypotheses on a sample of country cases that share the same trig-
ger for protest — suspicions of electoral fraud. To test these hypotheses, the
author utilized data on the maximum strength of repressions against civil so-
ciety organizations, participants in protests and authors of anti-government
messages on the Internet in the pre-electoral years, as well as data on protests
in the first week following the elections.
The study confirmed the influence of repressions on future protest acti-
vity. At the same time, the relationship between the severity of repressions and
the number of protest participants in the long term has a quadratic n-shaped
form: at low and high levels of repression, the number of protesters is minimal,
at medium — it is maximal. As for the impact of the Internet, it was not de-
tected on data on repression in the offline environment, but it was revealed on
data on the strength of sanctions for political activity on the Web: if the share
of Internet users in a country is low, repressions decrease the number of pro-
test participants; if it is high, repressions of medium strength correspond to the
maximum number of protesters.