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

大规模的抗议活动错过了机会，使我们更好地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，而另一些动员会建立政权支持。为了理解这些不同的结果，本项目将重点转移到抗议遗产：它们对政权合法化战略的持续影响，社会抵抗能力和未来的政权发展。到目前为止，很少有研究已经完成，以审查国家叙事和虚假信息的作用后，抗议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，以研究专制国家的抗议遗产，突出信息政治的作用。随着不满情绪演变为政治挫折，抗议活动蔓延，在一些地方，和平抗议让位于骚乱。最初，政府提供了政策上的让步，但当抗议活动持续时，政府转向镇压。该项目利用工具包措施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的出现和持续的政权不稳定提供基础。该项目突破了大规模抗议活动的研究，超越了抗议活动是否导致政权更迭的问题，分析了国家战略在应对群众动员方面的可行性。它使用了一个三人的领导者-追随者信号博弈，这使得现有文献中两种广泛方法的命题能够得到检验：（1）以国家为中心的方法，该方法借鉴了关于威权国家能力的文献，并将抗议描述为国家必须解决以重建控制的危机，以及（2）抗议积累模型，来自社会运动研究。专制国家可以通过体制改革、政策变革以及构建和重建关于抗议事件和国家对这些事件的反应的叙述来试图加强其合法性。个人的反应是接受或拒绝不同程度的国家叙事，影响未来的社会抗议能力。PI的领导者-追随者博弈预测了这些反应。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，使学者能够研究专制国家的抗议遗产，突出信息政治的作用。该工具包跨越抗议背景，建立一个抗议遗产的比较数据集，定义为：国家对事件的叙述，国家政策变化，以应对抗议，社会态度和重新抗议的能力。随着非民主国家的群众动员变得越来越普遍，对遗产的理解对于预测政权的持久性、市场破坏和未来冲突至关重要。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.