Arab Spring protests an isolated occurrence, not new Arab world trend
to a type of government face, Meirowitz said. The first few regimes in a new type of government significantly shape how the people feel about what is likely to come next.
“And if all governments are just going to turn out to be bad, then why take to the streets?” Meirowitz said.
Rick Wilson, editor of the American Journal of Political Science and the Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Political Science at Rice University, said the idea at the core of the paper “should prove to be path-breaking for the discipline.”
“The article asks a very reasonable question: Should we expect to see continuing protests in countries as the government is changed?” Wilson said. “For example, once citizens have organized protests in Tunisia that toppled an autocratic regime, should they continue to protest in light of the new regime? Especially if the new regime does not live up to its promises?
“One would think so. You could imagine that protestors have learned that protesting is an effective way to get rid of a bad government. But, as this article illustrates, this may not be true,” Wilson said. “If citizens get rid of one bad government only to get another bad one, it is easy to think that protest is futile. How many times will citizens protest (which can be quite costly) only to find out they are still no better off? Protests that lead to a change in government is no guarantee that the new government will be accountable.”
Real-world implications
While the long-term impact of the Arab Spring protests that first erupted at the end of 2010 is not yet clear, Meirowitz and Tucker argue that a recent example in Ukraine offers a demonstration of the theory in action.
The 2005 Orange Revolution in Ukraine that drew thousands to the streets swept Viktor Yanukovych out of office in response to his 2004 re-election, which was widely seen as corrupt. In 2010, however, he returned to power and the streets remained quiet despite an opponent’s claims of new electoral fraud.
The idea proposed by Meirowitz and Tucker could have implications for the foreign policy of the United States and other nations, by emphasizing the importance not just of the change in the type of government of nations but in the regime that follows.
“If you think about the U.S. government trying to figure out what it should be most worried about or where it should allocate resources, it might focus on the success of some of these first or second governments in new systems,” Meirowitz said.
The release notes that in the future, similar techniques could be used to examine which types of people in a particular nation are likely to protest, based on factors such as knowledge of government systems, the cost of protesting and how important the future is to an individual.
Meirowitz is the co-author, with Princeton politics professor Nolan McCarty, of the book Political Game Theory: An Introduction.
— Read more in Adam Meirowitz and Joshua A. Tucker, “People Power or a One-Shot Deal? A Dynamic Model of Protest,” American Journal of Political Science (24 January 2013) (DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12017)
