In her review of Democracy Protests, Anjali Bohlken raises a number of thought-provoking, significant, and challenging questions for future research regarding democracy protests. In my response to her generous review, I will try to add some insights into these questions based on research from the book.
An important question that Bohlken raises in her review concerns the factors, other than those which I observe in my book, that are likely to influence when economic crises result in democracy protests. I agree with Bohlken that there is much potential for further research on this question.
In my view, there are two sets of cases under which this is likely to be the case. The first set of cases affects the extent to which the public concludes that the causes or failure of governments to resolve economic crises is a result of the lack of democracy in their countries. For me, though, it is easier to anticipate where this is unlikely to be the case than where it is likely. This is unlikely to be the case, for example, where governments can effectively divert the blame for economic crises by burying economic statistics and blaming other countries for them. The second set of factors affects the degree of opposition that exists within governments and the opportunities for opposition leaders to use crises to generate support. Conflicts among leaders within governments over how to deal with economic crises may affect the former, while media openness may significantly affect the latter.
On the basis of her own research, Bohlken also asks a number of interesting questions that I had not considered regarding the relationship between democracy protests and local democratization. For my empirical analysis, I did not systematically collect data on protests demanding democracy at the local level, and so I cannot provide answers that are anywhere near definitive to these questions. What I can say, however, is that what I did (and did not find) in my research is consistent with Bohlken’s argument that local democratization is a top-down approach and a strategy of political elites in power to remain in power.
In my research, I did not come across many examples of protests for local democracy. The Umbrella Protests in Hong Kong are an important exception. I also did not find any cases where governments offered concessions at the local level to democracy protests at the national level. However, I would not expect to find any since there were no cases in the period that I analyzed (1989–2011) where opposition leaders, who organized national-level democracy protests, made demands regarding local democratization.
Although our two books differ in terms of the level of government analyzed, there is much agreement between the two that democratization at either the national level or the local level, even where bottom-up approaches like democracy protests are used to achieve national-level democratic reforms, is a result of the competition for power among national-level elites.
