Anti-regime action and geopolitical polarization: understanding protester dispositions in Belarus

Flowers, Tractors, & Telegram: Who are the Protesters in Belarus?: A Survey Based Assessment of Anti-Lukashenka Protest Participants

“…These might be partisan groups or groupings delineated by underlying policy preferences, attitudes, and values. The focus has been on how political dispositions towards the state and citizenship and certain value attributes (like progressive/liberal values in the case of so called "pro-democracy" protests and conservative/illiberal ones in the case of antimigrant, religious, or pro-regime protests) correlate to and even drive protest engagement (Onuch 2014a(Onuch , 2014bOnuch and Sasse 2022a). Research has shown that citizens are likely to participate in politics because they see their contributions as their duty as citizens (Riker and Ordeshook 1968).…”

“…Scholars have also demonstrated that collective action often relies on the formulation of clear political and/or economic grievances and claims (Gould 1995;Kawalerowicz and Biggs 2015;Opp 1988;Passini and Morselli 2015;Robertson 2004;Rosenfeld 2017;Tarrow 2011;Thomson 2018) that are shared across the protesting population and can form a master narrative (Beissinger 2013;Onuch and Sasse 2016a;Polletta 1998;Snow and Benford 1992). Because we know that the protesters in Belarus were at least in part triggered by a fraudulent election (Bedford 2021;Kazharski 2021a;Mateo 2022a;Moshes and Nizhnikau 2021;Onuch and Sasse 2022a;Petrova and Korosteleva 2021;Robertson 2022;Sierakowski 2020;Wijermars and Lokot 2022), we would expect the protest claims to center on pro-democracy values and orientations in relation to grievances focused on fraudulent elections and the regime's authoritarian repression.…”

“…Hence, we might expect that protesters and non-protesters consumed different media. Lastly, whilst these may not be the articulated protest grievances or claims per se, social science research on mass protest – but also on mass protest in competitive authoritarian and democratizing contexts – has repeatedly found that protesters also distinguish themselves from non-protesters in their preference or support for other at least initially seemingly unrelated (or not immediately seen as connected to the protest triggers) political dispositions and policy aims that do in fact, align with the democratic values and dispositions (de Almeida, Sá, and Faria 2022; Ash 2022; Li 2021; Onuch 2014b; Onuch and Sasse 2016b, 2022a, 2022b; Schumaker 1975; Winters and Weitz-Shapiro 2014). Thus, taking on board these empirically tested theories – confirmed not only in (competitive) authoritarian and democratizing contexts internationally but also specifically in cases like Ukraine, Georgia, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan – we have some clear expectations about the potential portrait of the median protester in Belarus’ mass mobilization in 2020.…”

“…This represents 5–6% of the population who joined in weekly protests in over 100 cities across the country (Mateo 2020). In Minsk it is estimated that 10% of the city’s population participated in the weekly protest marches (Onuch and Sasse 2022b, 2022a). These estimates rely on crowd estimations and reports of protest size at localities across the country and thus only capture individuals physically present at in-person protests.…”

The Dynamics of Mass Mobilization in Belarus

“…The events caught many observers by surprise and challenged some of the assumptions in the comparative literature on protests. The prolonged nature of the demonstrations, their all-country nature, the potential role of social media and messenger services, the informal organizational structure behind the mobilization, collective identities, the dynamics of regime repression, and the events’ aftermath are among the features that social scientists have begun to explore (Basik 2022; Bedford 2021; Bekus 2021; Bodrunova 2021; De Vogel 2022; Gapova 2021; Greene 2022; Kazharski 2021; Kazharski and Kubová 2021; Kulakevich 2020; Leukavets 2022; Maliauskaya 2022; Mateo 2022; Moshes and Nizhnikau 2021; Murashcenkova et al 2022; O’Loughlin and Toal 2022; Onuch and Sasse 2022b, 2022a; Pendse 2022; Petrova and Korosteleva 2021; G. Robertson 2022; Sierakowski 2020; Weller 2022; and Wijermars and Lokot 2022).…”