Repression and bystander mobilization in Africa

ABSTRACT

How does exposure to government repression shape bystander willingness to mobilize into a protest or demonstration? A robust body of scholarship has argued that repression can backfire, motivating activists to take to the streets after the government clamps down. Yet, while the evidence is strong that highly motivated and risk-acceptant citizens are willing to step up, less is known about how repression affects the majority of citizens who do not frequently participate in protests. Yet, theories of civil resistance often depend on mobilizing bystanders. I examine this by drawing on geocoded survey data as well as incident-level data of repression across Africa. I measure each respondent’s exposure to government repression across multiple spatial and temporal buffers. Contrary to expectations in the civil resistance literature, I find that exposure to repression correlates with a lower willingness to consider joining a protest or demonstration. The closer a respondent is, both temporally and spatially, to an incident of repression, the less likely they are to report that they would consider joining a protest. The results are robust to additional testing specifications that address issues of endogeneity, social desirability bias, and omitted variable bias.

KEYWORDS:

• Repression
• bystander
• Africa
• political psychology
• deterrence

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Trey Billing for his methodological assistance and two anonymous reviewers who provided helpful critique and feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. According to ACLED, in the first six months 2021 alone there have been 73,631 protests recorded. The second highest category of conflict, ‘battles,’ registers at 14,417.

2. An extensive literature exists addressing bystander attitudes toward social movements and protests. Work by Strauss (2018) details how similar bystanders can respond to repertoires of protest differently. Simon and Klandermans (2001) adopt a social psychological approach addressing how collective identity can be integrated into protest frames, and Subašić et al. (2008) focus on how collective identity links can be broken. Selvanathan and Lickel (2019) detail how existing attitudes about levels of injustice shape bystander opposition to protest movements.

3. The Afrobarometer data are collected every few years in large, multi-country ‘waves.’ The data collection methodology is well-detailed and has remained consistent over time; however, not all questions are asked in each round. While the national-level data collection is representative, the Afrobarometer project has yet to conduct surveys in highly unstable countries such as Somalia or the Democratic Republic of Congo.

4. As with all incident-level datasets, the ACLED do not – and cannot – capture every single protest. Because ACLED coders rely on newspapers, the data may overrepresent large or urban protests.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jacob S. Lewis

Jacob S. Lewis is an Assistant Professor of Global Politics in Washington State University’s School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs. His work focuses on issues of political psychology, social movements and conflict, perceptions of legitimacy, and trust. He focuses primarily on African politics. In addition to his academic work, he comes from a background in international development, where he managed and implemented post-conflict stabilization and democratization projects in countries across Africa and in Afghanistan.