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What happens when regime officials appear to treat certain kinds of protests as too trivial to warrant any serious attention or when they appear dismissive of protesters' mobilization? What about cases where days go by without an official response or when government officials appear to make a dismissive statement? What conceptual tools can we use to gain more insight into those scenarios? Although scholars have long studied the interaction between regime response and popular mobilization, they have largely focused on the categories of repression, concessions, and tolerance.1I argue that these categories fail to capture important protest dynamics, especially in cases where regime officials appear dismissive of popular mobilization, either through inaction or contempt. These dynamics include protesters' perceptions of the reaction of government officials during the period that elapsed between their initial mobilization and the end of their protest. During this period, protesters may start to develop their own reactions to the perceived dismissiveness of regime officials. The focus on repression directs attention to the behavior of security forces but obscures interactions between protesters and the targets of their mobilization. Similarly, the exclusive focus on whether concessions are eventually offered obscures the fact that protesters' perceptions of dismissive behavior on the part of the targets of their mobilization can influence how protesters perceive future concessions and subsequent interactions with regime officials. At the same time, the focus on "tolerance" or "toleration," to borrow a term increasingly used by scholars of contentious politics in China,2obscures the fact that protesters may have divergent perceptions of the police response on the one hand, and that of targeted officials on the other. In addition, studies that invoke the concept of "tolerance" focus primarily on why authoritarian regimes would tolerate certain forms of dissent but not others, rather than on the way in which protesters perceive this "tolerance." Even if the term "tolerating" effectively captures the response from the regime side, it carries positive connotations that obscure the various ways in which protesters might interpret or perceive such a response.
Arguing that "tolerance" is often treated as a residual category that carries little analytic leverage, I propose the concept of "ignoring" as an analytically distinct category of regime response to protests to capture situations in...