Perceptions, Contagion, and Civil Unrest

This paper investigates the empirical relationship between citizens' perceptions of economicand political conditions and the incidence of nonviolent uprisings. Perceptions are measured by aggregatingindividual-level data from regional barometer surveys. The main results show that negative perceptions of politicalconditions -- proxied by the share of the population that is generally dissatisfied with the way democracy works -- havea significant positive effect on the number of protests and strikes. Negative perceptions of economic conditions do notseem to be significantly related to the latter. This generally holds across a large sample of countries and isparticularly the case for Western and Central European countries as well as high-income countries. In developingeconomies, however, social protests appear to be driven by dissatisfaction with economic and political conditions. Theheterogeneous effects of perceptions on uprisings across geography and income groups, however, are not robust andsusceptible to changes in estimators and model specification. In particular, the international contagion ofprotests eliminates this international heterogeneity, implying that the incidence of uprisings in nearby countriestends to generate protests at home through its effect on perceptions related to political conditions in high-incomecountries. Overall, the effect of perceptions about political conditions, along with protest contagion, isrobust to the inclusion of numerous control variables that capture actual economic conditions and the quality ofgovernance across countries. The results are also robust to the use of seemingly valid instrumental variables,alternative count-data estimators, and sample composition.