Autocrats and peaceful resignation in the post-Soviet space: is there a political culture explanation?

ABSTRACT

When faced with large-scale dissent, autocracies often use repression. However, in some cases, autocrats resign peacefully, raising the question of why they do not prioritise the survival of their regime. I investigate a culture-related explanation I term “moderating” theory – that high levels of a country's support for democracy have a “moderating” cognitive effect on autocrats' decision-making – in two case studies: Georgia and Armenia. In 2003, President Eduard Shevardnadze (1995-2003) of Georgia peacefully stepped down following a large-scale electoral protest. In Armenia 2018, Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan (2008-2018) abandoned his position without using military force when faced with mass dissent.

KEYWORDS:

• Democratic protest
• authoritarian violence
• repression
• Armenia
• Georgia
• colour revolutions
• velvet revolution
• rose revolution
• democratic support
• political violence

Acknowledgement

Much of this article is adapted from a doctoral thesis submitted by the author (Pisareva 2021).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There is an ongoing debate about whether elite and public socialisation share the same patterns (Sullivan et al. 1993). Empirical evidence demonstrates that it differs case-by-case. For example, if a country is small, ethnically homogenous, and there is a strong sense of national identity, political socialisation for both elites and public does not have significant differences (Batiashvili 2019).

2 The overall number of interviews was twenty. However, because I investigated two research questions at the time, not all the interviews were relevant for the moderating hypothesis.

3 In Bayesian process-tracing, there is usually a comparsion of a proposed explanation (main hypothesis) against alternative ones. Because most of the evidence obtained is not unique (can support more than one hypothesis), having several alterantive explanations allows to see which one gains more empirical support.

4 Croissant, Kuehn, and Eschenauer (2018, 175) define this “endgame” as a “situation of primarily nonviolent mass mobilization, in which the dictator’s political survival depends on the loyalty of military leaders and their willingness to disperse protests.”

5 In process-tracing, high certainty implies that an observation should almost certainly occur under the hypothesised causal mechanism. Low uniqueness implies that this observation can also occur under alternative explanations.

6 The index is based on indicators that reflect government repression but that do not directly refer to elections. The question here is: to what extent are political liberties respected? Political liberties are understood as freedom of association and freedom of expression. Higher values correspond to stronger liberties.

7 Physical integrity is understood as freedom from political killings and torture by the government. The index is based on indicators that reflect violence committed by government agents but that do not directly refer to elections. Higher values represent higher levels of physical security.

8 As part of my fieldwork for doctoral thesis, I conducted twenty interviews in 2018–2019 in both Georgia (11) and Armenia (9).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dinara Pisareva

Dinara Pisareva is an Assistant Professor at Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan. Her interest areas include comparative democratisation, protest movements, and post-communist politics.