Abstract
My PhD seeks to explain why nondemocratic neopatrimonial regimes sometimes respond to street protests with concession, through case studies of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, between 2015 and 2019.Drawing on several different bodies of literature, I have developed three potential ‘motivations’ for the decision to offer concessions: the Threat Motivation, the Legitimation Motivation, and the Information Motivation. Each motivation is built around a different core regime objective and a corresponding function that protest and the concession response to it might play. In the Threat Motivation, the regime views protest as an immediate threat and responds with concessions to persuade protestors to go home. In the Legitimation Motivation, the regime uses concessions to counter the delegitimising signals sent by protest events. In the Information Motivation, the regime uses the information conveyed by protest to make decisions that increase its popular support.
The thesis is designed as a mixed-methods plausibility testing exercise, in response to the difficulty of seeing inside the ‘black box’ of authoritarian regimes. The primary data for plausibility testing, and to demonstrate that nondemocratic regimes do sometimes offer genuine concessions to protestors, is an original dataset of protest events and the government response to them in the three case study countries, covering the period 2015 to 2019. The dataset was constructed using a Protest Event Analysis (PEA) methodology and news data. This is supplemented with data from fieldwork, which involved interviews with experts and the recipients of protest concessions.
I demonstrate that in all three countries, concessions were sometimes offered to protestors. I argue that the Legitimation Motivation is the most plausible explanation in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and that the Information Motivation is not plausible in any case. I conclude that in high-capacity fully authoritarian contexts, the primary motivating factor for the regime to offer concessions to protestors is to protect its legitimation strategy from the delegitimising effects of the protestors’ claims.
| Date of Award | 1 May 2024 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Sam Greene (Supervisor) & Oisin Tansey (Supervisor) |