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* Lauren E. Young, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis, [email protected], www.laurenelyssayoung.com.
My thanks to the data collection team at Voice for Democracy. Thanks to Abhit Bhandari, Graeme Blair, Christopher Blattman, Alexander Coppock, Macartan Humphreys, Albert Fang, Grant Gordon, Donald Green, Kimuli Kasara, Dacher Keltner, Adrienne LeBas, Andrew Little, Isabela Mares, John Marshall, Eldred Masunungure, Gwyneth McClendon, Tamar Mitts, Suresh Naidu, Gabriella Sacramone-Lutz, Camille Strauss-Kahn, Thomas Zeitzoff, and seminar participants at CAPERS, WGAPE, NEWEPS, the Yale Institute for Social and Political Studies, APSA, and the Columbia Comparative Politics Seminar for feedback at various stages. Thanks to the US Institute for Peace; the International Peace Research Association Foundation; the Earth Institute Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity; the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; the Columbia University Department of Political Science; and the National Science Foundation for support for this research. This experiment was pre-registered with EGAP and can be accessed at http://egap.org/registration/1353. This research was approved by the Columbia University Institutional Review Board under protocol IRB-AAAP2200. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/OOMI57.
INTRODUCTION
Forty-two percent of the world’s population live in countries where political imprisonment or brutality is common.1 Citizens in these repressive regimes must make difficult decisions about whether or not to express their dissent—decisions that are difficult not only because the stakes are high, but also because informational signals are infrequent and ambiguous, and decisions must be made in stressful, emotional environments. Coercive violence is analyzed by political scientists as an informational signal of the cost of dissent, but it is often perpetrated in a way that seems designed to maximize fear through graphic torture, public spectacle, or violation of norms. Does the emotion of fear play an important role in shaping citizens’ willingness to dissent in autocracy, and if so, how?
This study tests a theory that emotions influence dissent by shaping how citizens perceive and process information about its risks. I present a simple decision framework that is a function of the strength of citizen preferences for an alternative regime, the repressiveness of the regime, and the number of other people who are expressing dissent. I argue that dissent decisions are affected in systematic ways by citizens’...