Protests and Reputation
Working Paper No. 06-W15
Lucia Buenrostro, Amrita Dhillon and Myrna Wooders
ABSTRACT [article]
Protests take place for a variety of reasons. In this paper we focus on protests that have a well defined objective, that is in
conflict with the objectives of the government. Hence the success or
failure of a protest movement depends crucially on how the government
responds. We assume that government types are private information so
that governments have an interest in building a reputation to deter
protestors. We extend the standard reputation framework to one where
potential protesters in the domestic jurisdiction are competing in a
common market with protestors of a foreign jurisdiction, resulting in a
situation where domestic governments care about the decisions of foreign
governments. We derive conditions under which an equilibrium with
"contagion" in protests might exist: protests that start in one
jurisdiction spread to others. Finally we use our results to interpret
the Fuel tax protests in France and England that took place in 2000 as
well as the three successive pro-democracy revolutions in Georgia,
Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan in 2003-05.
Keywords and Phrases: Protest, social movements, contagion, reputation equilibrium,
Fuel tax protests, pro-democracy revolutions
JEL Classification Number: F50, C72, D72, D82