QoG seminar with Jan Rustemeyer

Why do some protests escalate from reform-seeking demands to callsfor regime change, while others do not? Previous campaign-level analysis finds evidence for an effect of repression on demand escalation, depending on organizational features of the campaign (Kang, 2023). This study investigates the conditional role that repression and protesters’ risk-acceptance thresholds jointly play in contributing to demand escalation. Employing newly constructed protest-event data on maximalist demands, derived from the existing Mass Mobilization in Autocracies Database (MMAD), I argue that repression contributes to demand escalation, if protesters with a high threshold for risk-acceptance are participating in the protests. Using the presence of student and youth actors as a proxy for high risk acceptance, Cox proportional hazard models show how repression significantly increases the likelihood of subsequent maximalist demands only in the presence of these risk-accepting protesters. By contrast, neither repression nor high-risk protesters alone explain demand escalation. These findings suggest that demand escalation is driven by a conditional backlash dynamic in the form of an interaction between repression and riskaccepting protesters, contributing to our understanding on the emergence of maximalist demands on a protest event-level.