Grievances, Mobilization, and Mass Opposition to Authoritarian Regimes: A Subnational Analysis of East Germany’s 1953 Abbreviated Revolution

Abstract

Mass opposition to authoritarian governments is caused by economic grievances and factors which facilitate mobilization. In this article, I explore these competing explanations of revolution with a county-level analysis of the June 17, 1953, uprising against the socialist dictatorship in East Germany. I argue that grievances can drive unrest, but only when they are disproportionately large and clearly attributable to a regime. Mobilization capacity is the primary driver of unrest outcomes, but depends on group structure and communications networks which are difficult to capture using cross-national indicators. Independent farmers with intense grievances attributable to the East German regime’s agricultural collectivization policies were associated with unrest despite significant obstacles to mobilization. Construction workers with strong mobilization structures and dense communications networks were significant instigators of unrest despite small numbers and moderate grievances. These findings raise important questions for both theoretical and empirical treatments of revolutionary threats to autocratic regimes.

The politics of export restrictions: A panel data analysis of African commodity processing industries

“…Moreover, the paper contributes to recent research emphasizing that the severity and attributability of a policy can shape both the collective action capacity of those affected and thus the policy's attractiveness to politicians (Batley & Mcloughlin, 2015;Harding, 2015;Harding & Stasavage, 2014). Third, it adds to a growing literature demonstrating that rural mass interests can under certain circumstances become a credible threat to both democratic and authoritarian governments (Boone, 2003;Kjaer, 2015;Pierskalla, 2016;Thomson, 2018). Finally, with the creation of the EPTA dataset, the most comprehensive export prohibition and taxation dataset to date, it helps clear the road for future research into the politics and economics of industrial and trade policy in Africa, and particularly into an increasingly important, albeit massively under-researched topic: export restrictions.…”

“…Studies on public service provision as well as rentseeking have shown that when policy outcomes are more visible and attributable to government action, citizens are more likely to hold politicians accountable for them (Batley & Mcloughlin, 2015;Harding, 2015;Harding & Stasavage, 2014;Keefer & Khemani, 2003;Mani & Mukand, 2007;Persson & Tabellini, 2000). Scholars researching the reaction and protest to government policy in such different contexts as Latin American economic crises (Frieden, 1991), East Germany's 1953 revolt (Thomson, 2018) or industrial upgrading attempts in the Ugandan dairy industry (Kjaer, 2015;Whitfield et al, 2015) have found that the more severe the impact of a policy, the greater the likelihood that the policy's losers will mobilize against it. Importantly, this association functions via two channels.…”

“…for years in which a commodity was not affected by an export prohibition. To deal with the problem of serial dependence in the data, I follow standard practice in quantitative conflict onset research and code all country-commodity-years after the introduction of an export ban as missing as long as they were affected by a ban (Buhaug & Rød, 2006;Schulz, 2015;Thomson, 2018). 6 Similarly, all country-commodity-years for which no clear year of introduction was identified, or which had already been restricted at the outset of the first year of available data were also dropped from the analysis.…”

Meet the victim: Police corruption, violence, and political mobilization

“…Grievances might be of different origins and magnitudes (social, political, etc. ); they may appear suddenly in individuals' lives and produce diverse behavioral effects and be subject to changes over time (Hechter et al, 2016; Kiewiet de Jonge, 2009; Thompson, 2018). For instance, some types of corruption might have a stronger impact on citizens' lives, causing higher levels of distress and anger.…”

The politics of nonviolent mobilization: Campaigns, competition, and social movement resources

“…The implication from the study of campaigns is that they must have such resources for nonviolence. For example, in the 1953 East German uprising, networks and communication among construction workers were important in driving nonviolent mobilization (Thomson, 2018; Crabtree, Kern & Pfaff, 2018). In Nepal, the country’s Congress Party built connections across social groups and with the state, turning to nonviolent resistance, whereas the Communist Party lacked such connections and turned to violent resistance (Thurber, 2019).…”