Police Repression and Protest Behavior: Evidence from Student Protests in Chile

Abstract

Police repression is a common feature of street protests around the world but evidence about its impact on dissident behavior is limited. We provide an empirical analysis of people linked to a student killed by a stray bullet coming from a policeman during a large protest. Using administrative data on daily school attendance, we follow his schoolmates and those living nearby the shooting in hundreds of protest and non-protest days to estimate whether police repression affected their protest behavior. We find that repression causes a temporary deterrence effect but only on students with social (rather than geographic) links to the victim. Moreover, we show that police violence increased adherence to a student-led boycott two years after the shooting and had negative educational consequences for students. These findings cast doubt on the effectiveness of police repression in quieting dissent and ensuring public safety.

Civic Responses to Police Violence

“…Strikingly, gains in civic engagement are largest following police killings of unarmed individuals and are accompanied by increased support for criminal justice reforms. Together, our results add to emerging evidence of the social consequences of police use of force (Ang 2021;Bor et al 2018;González and Prem 2020;Legewie and Fagan 2019).…”

Social Media and the Broadening of Social Movements: Evidence from Black Lives Matter

“…Our analysis also contributes to a large literature that analyzes the determinants of social movements and protests, ranging from macro level drivers, such as local institutions or socio-economic conditions (Lipsky, 1968;Eisinger, 1973;McCarthy and Zald, 1977;Besley and Persson, 2011;Dube and Vargas, 2013;Berman et al, 2017), to micro level drivers, including individual decision making processes (Ellis and Fender, 2011;Guriev and Treisman, 2015;Sangnier and Zylberberg, 2017;Chenoweth et al, 2022) and different aspects of individual and social psychology (Guriev and Treisman, 2015;Sangnier and Zylberberg, 2017;Passarelli and Tabellini, 2017;González and Prem, 2020;Hager et al, 2020;Kutlaca et al, 2022;García-Jimeno et al, 2022;Cantoni et al, 2019;Bursztyn et al, 2021).…”