Mobilization, Repression, and Revolution: Grievances and Opportunities in Contentious Politics

Abstract

I develop a framework to study the interactions between dissidents and the state that reconciles political-process and grievance-based theories of protests and provides insights into interpreting the conflicting empirical studies that sometimes support one theory and sometimes the other. I show that contrary to the theoretical predictions of the literature, the relationship between the magnitude of grievances (e.g., the level of income inequality or economic hardship) and the likelihood of repression can be nonmonotone, and given some assumptions, is U-shaped. That is, as the magnitude of grievances increases from low to high, the likelihood of repression first decreases and then increases. Indeed, the data suggest a nonmonotone, U-shaped relationship between the level of repression and income inequality. I also discuss the implications for the empirical studies of repression.