Collaborative Research: RAPID: A Novel Framework & Toolkit to Measure Protest Legacies in Non-democratic States

大规模抗议错失了提高我们理解为什么有些动员会导致新的抗议和意想不到的政权挑战，以及其他建立政权支持的情况的机会。为了理解这些不同的结果，这个项目将重点转移到抗议遗产：它们对政权合法化战略、社会抵抗能力和未来政权发展的持续影响。到目前为止，很少有人研究抗议后国家叙述和虚假信息的作用及其对公众舆论的影响。该项目开发了一个快速反应工具包，以研究威权国家的抗议遗产，突出信息政治的作用。随着不满情绪演变为政治挫败感，抗议活动蔓延开来，在一些地方，和平抗议让位于骚乱。起初，该政权提供了政策让步，但当抗议活动继续时，政府转向镇压。该项目使用工具包措施来跟踪自上而下的恢复秩序战略以及公民对政权恢复秩序努力的反应。这种研究遗产的新方法将为理解新的抗议周期和政权持续不稳定的出现提供基础。这个项目在研究大规模抗议活动方面开辟了新的天地，超越了抗议活动是否会导致政权更迭的问题，而是分析了应对大规模动员的国家战略的可行性。它使用了一个三人领导人-追随者信号游戏，这使得能够从现有文献中的两个广泛方法来测试命题：(1)国家中心方法，它来自关于威权国家能力的文献，并将抗议描述为国家必须解决的危机，以重新建立控制，以及(2)抗议累积模型，来自社会运动研究。独裁国家可以通过机构改革、政策变化以及构建和重建有关抗议事件和国家对这些事件的反应的叙述来加强其合法性，从而对抗议活动做出反应。个人的反应是在不同程度上接受或拒绝国家叙事，影响未来社会的抗议能力。PI的领导者-追随者游戏预测了这些反应。利用最近的大规模动员，该项目开发了一个快速反应工具包，使学者能够研究威权国家的抗议遗产，突出信息政治的作用。该工具包跨越抗议背景，建立抗议遗产的比较数据集，定义为：关于事件的国家叙述，应对抗议的国家政策变化，以及新一轮抗议的社会态度和能力。随着大规模动员在非民主国家变得越来越普遍，对遗产的理解对于预测政权的持久性、市场混乱和未来的冲突至关重要。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Large-scale protests are missed opportunities to improve our understanding of why some cases of mobilization lead to renewed protest and unexpected regime challenges and other cases it builds regime support. To understand these different outcomes, this project shifts focus to protest legacies: their sustained effects on regime legitimation strategies, societal capacity to resist, and future regime development. To date, little research has been done to examine the role of state narratives and disinformation following protest and its effect on public opinion. This project develops a Rapid Response Toolkit to study protest legacies in authoritarian states, highlighting the role of information politics. Protest spread as grievances evolved to include political frustration and, in some places, peaceful protest gave way to riots. Initially the regime offered policy concessions, but when protest continued, the state turned to repression. The project uses Toolkit measures to track top-down strategies to restore order and citizens' reactions to regime efforts to restore order. This new approach to studying legacies will provide a basis for understanding the emergence of new protest cycles and continued regime instability. This project breaks new ground on the study of large-scale protest by moving beyond the question of whether protests result in regime change to analyzing the viability of state strategies in response to mass mobilization. It uses a three-person leader-follower signaling game, which enables the testing of propositions from two broad approaches in the existing literature: (1) the State-centric Approach, which draws from the literature on authoritarian state capacity and characterizes protest as a crisis that the state must address to reestablish control, and (2) the Protest Accumulation Model, drawn from social movement studies. Autocratic states can react to protest by attempting to bolster their legitimacy through institutional reform, policy change and by constructing and reconstructing narratives about the protest events and the state's response to these events. Individuals react by accepting or rejecting state narratives to different degrees, affecting future societal protest capacity. The PIs' leader-follower game predicts those responses. Utilizing recent mass mobilizations, the project develops a Rapid Response Toolkit to enable scholars to study protest legacies in authoritarian states, highlighting the role of information politics. The toolkit travel across protest contexts to build a comparative data set of protest legacies, defined as: state narratives about events, state policy change to respond to protest, and social attitudes and capacity for renewed protest. As mass mobilization in non-democratic countries becomes more common, an understanding of legacies is critical to predict regime durability, market disruptions, and future conflict.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.