A win or a flop? Measuring mass protest successfulness in authoritarian settings
| Author | Kimberly Turner |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433221140434 |
| Published date | 01 January 2023 |
| Date | 01 January 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
A win or a flop? Measuring mass protest
successfulness in authoritarian settings
Kimberly Turner
Watson Institute, Brown University & Belfer Center, Harvard University
Abstract
Previously rare events, mass protest movements have become popular vehicles for those seeking political, economic,
and social change. How do we eval uate movement success? Most studies addressing movement outcomes are
grounded in the goal attainment approach, where movement success is dependent upon fulfilling one’s stated
demands. The models derived from this approach heavily rely on visibility and transparency in the policymaking
process. These offer limited analytical utility for scholars studying movements in authoritarian states, where policy-
making is shrouded and media is state-controlled. Evaluating movements solely on their fulfillment of mission goals
is highly problematic, as movements produce more outcomes than their intended goals. Movements also produce
unintended benefits: concessions unrelated to the movement’s mission. These include negative consequences, or
societal costs. Since movements produce both positive and negative unintended outcomes, any evaluation of a
movement should also incorporate the costs associated with new gains. I argue a cost–benefit approach improves
scholarly conceptualization and measurement of protest success. I conceptualize protest success as multidimensional
and comprised of protest gains and societal costs. I develop a 21-point scale of protest success using Mokken Scale
Analysis. AISP diagnostics indicate gains and costs comprise separate subscales, which are collapsed to produce total
sum scores. I score 34 nonviolent movements in authoritarian states between 2002 and 2013 on an additive scale.
Protests in authoritarian settings attain considerable accomplishments; however, those gains come with significant
cost. Most total success scores are negative, indicating considerable backlash is common during and immediately after
the demobilization of movements in authoritarian states. Success scores improve upon the canonical binary measure
by: (1) offering improved discrimination between movements, (2) identifying cases of regime ‘ignoring’, and (3)
pinpointing misclassified cases. By incorporating negative consequences into our evaluations, we advance our
understanding why movements deemed successful by scholars are disappointments to their home publics.
Keywords
anocracy, authoritarian, protest, scaling, social movements, success
Introduction
How should we evaluate the ‘successfulness’ of mass
movements? A decade after the Jasmine Revolution
sparked a global surge in mass nonviolence movements,
it is appropriate to re-examine how we evaluate move-
ments. In this article, I posit a theoretical shift in the
conceptualization of movement success. Traditional
metrics of success focus on demonstrators’ ability to
extract concessions from the government. However, con-
cessions are not the sole external outcome of movements.
Since movements produce both positive and negative
external outcomes, any evaluation of a movement should
also incorporate the costs associated with new gains.
I propose a shift away from the goal attainment approach
(which focuses solely on movement victories vis-a
´-vis
their agenda) to a cost–benefit approach (where we ana-
lyze a movement’s scorecard of positive and negative
consequences). I improve upon former measures of pro-
test success by reconceptualizing success as multidimen-
sional: comprised of gains and costs, and relative rather
than absolute.
Corresponding author:
kimberlyturner@hks.harvard.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2023, Vol. 60(1) 107–123
ªThe Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433221140434
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What constitutes success broadly interests conflict
scholars and activists alike. While scholars of nonviolent
conflict adapted models of political violence, few models
examining the outcomes and intricacies of nonviolence
travel back to the violence literature. This study attempts
to fulfil that need by offering a reconceptualization of
success grounded on dynamics and outcomes found in
both violent and nonviolent movements (Abrahms,
2006; Pape, 2003). The incremental nature of success
imbued in this model directly addresses the ‘partial suc-
cess’ arguments of the terrorism and revolution litera-
ture. Scholars such as Thomas (2014) argue partial
achievements, such as terrorist participation in negotia-
tion settlements due to their terroristic activities, are
indicative of success. By treating success as a multidi-
mensional spectrum rather than discrete and unidimen-
sional, I provide a general model of success with utility
for both violent and nonviolent conflict scholars.
Despite the explosive growth of the nonviolent con-
flict literature, scholarly definitions of campaign ‘success’
are often at odds with societal realities. The same move-
ments deemed wildly successful by scholars can appear
to their home societies and even activists (Useem &
Goldstone, 2022; Suh, 2014; Goodwin & Jasper,
2006; Giugni, McAdam & Tilly, 1999) as disappoint-
ments. The source of this disconnect is the exclusion of
negative consequences from prevailing definitions of
movement success. I bridge this disconnect by incorpor-
ating previously omitted positive and negative unin-
tended consequences, producing an improved measure
of protest success. Using Mokken Scale Analysis,
I comparably measure the net successfulness of 34 anti-
governmental movements in authoritarian regimes from
2002 to 2013. I find protests in authoritarian states
effectively obtain positive outcomes, but often at signif-
icant cost. Once societal costs are accounted for, mass
protests in authoritarian states have strongly negative
scores for their societies. The prevalence of negative
scores offers us insight into the disappointment literature,
where dissatisfaction rates continue to rise even in
success cases like Tunisia (Ianchovichina, 2018: 146).
Simply analyzing the victories of the Jasmine Revolution,
without accounting for the costs, obscures our ability to
understand Tunisians’ persistent dissatisfaction.
Defining success
Mass protests are dangerous endeavors. When evaluating
a movement, scholars are typically concerned
with a movement’s internal or external consequences,
or outcomes. The outcomes of anti-governmental
demonstrations are vital to efficacy estimations of this
type of political behavior. Internal outcomes, such as
internal cohesiveness, mission creep, and the loss of non-
violent discipline are outside this study’s scope. Instead, I
focus on movements’ political and economic external
outcomes, representing shifts in a country’s polity,
policies, or politics (Giugni, 1998; Giugni, Bosi &
Uba, 2013). Protest outcomes may be intermediate
or long-term, social, political, economic, cultural, ideo-
logical, and personal or biographical (Amenta, 2007;
Giugni, 2008).
Studies which measure and compare movement out-
comes remain surprisingly scarce. This is partially
because outcomes are complex and dynamic (Snyder &
Kelly, 1979), contain positive and negative unintended
consequences (Rucht, 1998; Piven & Cloward, 1977),
and are notoriously difficult to measure over time and
space (Earl, 2000; Amenta & Young, 1999). Amenta
et al. (2010: 295) argue outcome studies are scarce as
they ‘require analysis over long time periods and across
many different movements, issue areas, and countries’.
As a result, the protest literature remains predominately
preoccupied with protest initiations rather than their
outcomes. This gap is problematic as campaign success
is of vital interest to both academics and activists. Data
collection of protest outcomes remains a significant bar-
rier to quantitative studies of protests. Over the last 15
years, data collection efforts greatly reduced barriers to
studying protests in repressive regimes. Publicly available
datasets, such as NAVCO (Chenoweth & Shay, 2019),
Mass Mobilization Protest Data (Salehyan et al., 2012),
Social Conflict Analysis Dataset (SCAD) (Clark &
Regan, 2016), and others track and report protest cam-
paigns across the globe. With a wealth of new data
collected on authoritarian states, it is appropriate to re-
examine how we judge movements.
The canonical measure of a movement’s success is the
movement’s effectiveness in obtaining its stated demands
(Wang & Piazza, 2016; Tarrow, 2011; Gamson, 2014).
While parsimonious, the analysis of protest success is
limited to movement outcomes matching the move-
ment’s stated goals. This definition of campaign success
remained remarkably static and firmly embedded in the
resource and goal attainment approaches. The resource
approach evaluates protests based on changes in the
structural conditions and institutions of government.
Movements are considered solely on their ability to
extract resources from the regime (Giugni, 2008:
1584). Gamson (1975) firmly established the goal fulfil-
ment definition of success in his foundational book, The
Strategy of Social Protest. Gamson conditioned success
108 journal of PEACE RESEARCH 60(1)
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