Searching for the Agency: Political Violence, State Repression and Popular Mobilization

What is the relationship between violence and popular mobilization? Is there any tradeoff between the two? Do greater levels of mobilization lead to more or less violence? In this paper we suggest an intermediate approach to the study of social mobilization and political violence. Most large-N studies have neglected the role of social movements in analyzing anti-government violence because of the problems with data gathering and the reliability of existing data. On the other side, many case studies have documented a resilient link between protests and violence, showing that violence spikes when the wave of mobilization comes to an end. Here we to test this finding by using the tools of the large-N literature, with a panel-like dataset encompassing all countries from 1945 to 2009. Our findings solidly support the existence of a positive relationship between mobilization and violence. Overall, mobilization and violence seem to be complementaries rather than substitutes. However, this finding must be qualified in three ways. First, for very high levels of mobilization, further mobilization has a negative effect on violence. This may be because the movement becomes powerful in terms of numbers, violence being dispensable or counterproductive. Second, violence tends to appear in the declining phase of the mobilization cycle, confirming what the literature on social movements had argued based on case studies. Finally, the effect of mobilization on violence is conditioned on repression. While for low levels of repression more mobilization leads to greater violence, this effect is curbed for high levels of repression.