University of Helsinki
Summer vacation is over for the majority of Finnish residents, and we are also back to work. Today we are happy to present you our last keynote speaker, Regina Smyth.
Regina Smyth is a Professor of Political Science at Indiana University. Her primary research interest is in the dynamics of state-society relations in transitional and electoral authoritarian regimes. She has also has written extensively on political development in the Russian Federation, including her recent book Elections, Protest, and Authoritarian Regime Stability: Russia 2008–2020 (Cambridge University Press, 2020). At the workshop, Professor Smyth will give a talk “Electoral Manipulation, Information, and the Path to Post-election Protest”:
Empirical studies of the effect of electoral competition on post-election protest often reveal relationships between state manipulation, institutional constraints, and outcomes on protest events. In this paper, I return to a formal model developed in my recent book that conceptualizes post-election protest as a product of the interaction between the state and the opposition that shapes voters’ electoral behavior and perceptions of electoral fairness. This approach underscores the role of opposition forces even in periods when they are under-institutionalized or banned from formal politics. I explain these individual-level decisions using individual cross-national data combined with national-level data on institutions, economic conditions, and electoral malpractice and opposition actions. In the second stage of the analysis, I test the effect of these different outcomes on the likelihood of protest. Signals from aggregate outcomes (turnout, vote switching, support for state party, and attitudes about elections) describe different states of the world and identify different mechanism that might spark post-election protest. Yet, these distinctions are rarely examined in a comparative framework. When the state allows opposition parties to run, the most likely path to protest is an electoral revolution, or action rooted in campaign mobilization and opposition coalition. In contrast, when the state ban opposition parties and candidates protest emerges from mechanisms of coordination that are more dependent on clear signals about the electorates’ preferences that kick-off an information cascade that quickly escalates protest actions.
Professor Smyth joins the other five keynote speakers, who will be all giving their lectures during the workshop on 25-26th of October, in addition to acting as discussants during the workshop panel sessions. The preliminary programme can be found on the designated page.
More information on the workshop will be coming during the next weeks, so stay tuned!