Unpopular Protest: Mass Mobilization and Attitudes to Democracy in Post-Mubarak Egypt

Abstract

Political science has long debated the significance of protest during a democratic transition, but attention has been largely confined to its impact on elite support for democracy. Contributing to scholarship on the attitudinal consequences of mobilization, we examine how protest shaped popular perceptions of democracy during the post-Mubarak transition in Egypt. We do this by matching Wave II of the Arab Barometer survey with geo-referenced protest events reported in Arabic-language newspapers. Our results show that Egyptians came to hold less favourable attitudes to democracy following sustained protest in their district. We find that this relationship was especially pronounced in areas where protestors launched longerlasting, static street protests that targeted public space. Qualitative case details illustrate how such tactics could disrupt everyday life and impact livelihoods. These findings highlight one way in which popular support for democracy can be eroded during a transition. Tore Wig, and three anonymous reviewers gave valuable comments and suggestions. We also thank Margit Tavits for her feedback and guidance. Rania AbdelNaeem, Steven Brooke, and Sarah ElMasry generously shared data on the 2005 Egyptian elections, while Michael Robbins provided us with a restricted version of the Arab Barometer and patiently answered questions about the survey methodology. Neil Ketchley the deployment of the survey saw workers, activists, and local residents stage over 2,000 protests across the country. For identification we use an instrumental variable that exploits respondents' spatial relationship to protest ecologies that emerged during the 25th January Revolution.Our results suggest that Egyptians came to hold more negative attitudes to democracy following sustained protest in their district. In such areas, survey respondents were more likely to associate democracy with economic and moral threat, indecisive government, and instability. Disaggregating our measure of mobilization, we find that this relationship was especially pronounced in areas where protestors used longer-lasting, street-level tactics that disrupted public space. Qualitative case details attest to the fallout of this protest and suggest that popular disquiet was related to the negative impact of protest on livelihoods and the routine practices of everyday life.In making sense of these findings, we argue that the high levels of mobilization witnessed in the post-Mubarak transition caused some Egyptians to update their view of how democracy functions in practice. Transitional periods are often low information settings characterized by a high level of uncertainty in which citizens are forming opinions about the emerging nature of a democratic regime (Mattes and Bratton 2007; Meirowitz and Tucker 2013). In such settings, direct experience can serve as a key source of, or shortcut for, information (Mattes and Bratton 2007). Crucially, protest elicits concessions by inflicting a cost on authorities and this can have knock-on effects for broader public...

Did local civil rights protest liberalize whites’ racial attitudes?

“…High turnout in a city’s Tea Party rally, for example, mobilized right-wing activists who then affected local public opinion (Madestam et al, 2013). Sustained disruptive protest in Egypt after the 2011 revolution eroded support for democracy among people living in the vicinity (Ketchley and El-Reyyes, 2020). This assumption is much less appropriate for the Civil Rights movement, however.…”

“…Mazumder’s key independent variable—the occurrence of protest at the county level—is derived from a single newspaper, the New York Times . By contrast, other recent studies of the effects of protest utilize event data from multiple newspapers (Ketchley and El Reyyes, 2020), often complemented by records from movement organizations (Madestam et al, 2013). The vast majority of protest events are never reported in the New York Times —a recent estimate is under 5% (Beyerlein et al, 2018).…”

“…Given that Mazumder’s dependent variables derive from respondents’ answers to survey questions, it would be natural to include the respondents’ own characteristics as control variables—unless those characteristics are plausibly affected by protest in the 1960s. Such individual-level variables are included in other studies (Ketchley and El-Reyyes, 2020; McVeigh et al, 2014), including the one from which Mazumder takes his dependent variables (Acharya et al, 2016: Online Appendix B1). “To allow for more conservative inferences,” Mazumder (2018: 927) opts instead to aggregate respondents into counties and discards information about their individual characteristics.…”

“…Most obviously, protest can induce more favorable attitudes to the cause (Andrews et al, 2016; Branton et al, 2015; Madestam et al, 2013; Tertytchnaya and Lankina, 2020; Wallace et al, 2014). Protest can also have the reverse effect, polarizing opinion (Motta 2018) or even eroding support for democracy (Ketchley and El-Reyyes, 2020). All these studies identify effects over the short term, from a few days to a few years.…”

Propaganda as Protest Prevention: How Regime Labeling Deters Citizens from Protesting—Without Persuading Them

“…Furthermore, criminality could suggest protesters pose a physical threat, leading citizens to become more supportive of the use of coercion (Hou and Quek 2019). Criminality could also suggest disruption and impact on citizens' livelihoods, which cause citizens to sour on protests (Ketchley and El-Rayyes 2019).…”