Manufactured Ambiguity

Kruszewska, Dominika; Ekiert, Grzegorz

doi:10.1017/9781108784146.002

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 233 publications

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“…Mobilizing the masses through rallies, public gatherings, and campaigns to support state interests and agendas is one of the tactics that autocrats have adopted to achieve multiple purposes. Autocrats mobilize their supporters to respond to threats from anti-government movements (Ekiert et al, 2020; Hellmeier and Weidmann, 2020; Ketchley, 2016; Kruszewska and Ekiert, 2020), to intimidate the opposition and prevent future challenges (Beissinger, 2020; Hemment, 2015), to gather support for electoral competition with opposition parties (Handlin, 2020), to enhance their developmental projects (Looney, 2020; Palmer and Ning, 2020), to signal their support for territorial and geostrategic interests beyond their borders (Greene and Robertson, 2020), and to reinforce their foreign and security policy-signaling strategy (Weiss, 2014). In light of the recent wave of democratic erosion and the rise of incumbents with authoritarian tendencies within electoral democracies, pro-government mobilization tactics have become more common within institutional democracies (Cunningham and Owens, 2020; Kydd, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sanctuaries or Battlegrounds? State Penetration in Places of Worship, University Campuses, and State Bureaucracy for Pro-Government Mobilization: Evidence from Iran (2015–2019)

Khani,

Kadivar

2023

Comparative Political Studies

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What factors shape different levels of pro-government mobilization in authoritarian regimes? The existing literature has considered the threat of anti-regime protests as the primary driver of pro-government mobilization. While we confirm this finding in the literature, we argue that the regime’s organizational infrastructure significantly contributes to pro-regime mobilization. We identify places of worship, university campuses, and state bureaucracy as three main sites where states could extend their organizations for pro-government mobilization. Previous scholarship has considered universities and places of worship as free spaces for oppositional activities, but we argue that states might try to penetrate these sectors to extend their organizational reach. The statistical analyses of our original data on pro-government mobilization in Iran from 2015 to 2019 at the district level ( n = 429) provide robust support for this argument.

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