Protest

The Electoral Consequences of Political Protest

(with Graeme Robertson) In recent years, protest in both democracies and authoritarian regimes has taken a central place in political science as urban protests have proliferated across the world. Much of this recent literature is focused upon the effects of protest and in particular the effects of protests on political attitudes, whether of protesters (Converse and Philips 1991, Pop-Eleches et al. 2018) or bystanders (Banaszak and Ondercin 2016, Tertychnaya and Lankina 2018, Wouters 2018).

Decentralizing States, Decentralizing Protest

(with Kaitlin Alper) Contentious politics is intricately tied to the creation of the modern nation-state, with changes to the state driving new forms and patterns of contention and contention forcing state adaptations. Chief among these reciprocal changes was the centralization of the state; driven initially by the need to more efficiently extract resources, centralization crosscut highly local identities and repertoires of protest, leading contentious actors to centralize in response. The centralization of contention allowed citizens to extract key concessions from early modern states, paving the way for both democracy and modern social movements.