The Long-Term Impact of Mobilization and Repression on Political Trust

Abstract

Authoritarian regimes respond to threatening student movements with repression and censorship. In many cases, failed movements are effectively erased from public memory. Do such movements affect long-term attitudes? We use a survey of college graduates to measure the impact of a failed student movement. Some of our respondents began college immediately before a major protest; others started after the movement had been suppressed. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity, we find that individuals who attended college during the movement are significantly less likely to trust the government, more than 25 years later, than individuals who enrolled after the protests. The effects are strongest for trust in the central government, and weakest for local government. These results are robust to a range of specifications, and show that the experience of mass mobilization and state repression can have a long-term impact on public attitudes, even if the event in question remains taboo.

Resisting autocratization: the protest–repression nexus in Hong Kong's Anti-ELAB Movement

“…2 The persistence of democratic ethos among the opposition implies that, while a post-repression society in general could become more conservative, protesters' grievances and aspirations will not fade away easily. This also helps us partially understand the results from Desposato et al (2021) and Wang (2021), which indicate that the psychological scars from historical repression can last for generations among those affected.…”

“…Based on different country samples, this body of literature consistently finds that repressions immediately lower people's trust in their governments (Sangnier and Zylberberg, 2017;Frye and Borisova, 2019;Neundorf et al, 2020;Curtice and Behlendorf, 2021), making the people more conservative and encouraging them to prioritize social order (El-Mallakh, 2020;Tertytchnaya and Lankina, 2020). Moreover, from a longer-term perspective, it also finds that repression can have long-term effects to make people who were exposed long ago to be less trusting of their national leaders and governments (Desposato et al, 2021;Wang, 2021). Kobayashi et al (2021) and Tung et al (2021), in this special issue, join this collective endeavor by assessing the effects of the NSL as soft repression on the Anti-ELAB Movement.…”

Anti-ELAB Movement, National Security Law, and heterogeneous institutional trust in Hong Kong

“…There has been a burgeoning scholarly interest recently in investigating empirically both long-and short-term impacts of protests and mass mobilizations on citizens' political preferences in both democratic and nondemocratic contexts (Madestam et al, 2013;Sangnier and Zylberberg, 2017;Mazumder, 2018;Frye and Borisova, 2019;El-Mallakh, 2020;Tertytchnaya and Lankina, 2020). Moreover, this growing literature also well extends to how their repressions in different forms affect the same set of outcomes (Lawrence, 2016;Rozenas and Zhukov, 2019;Dinas and Northmore-Ball, 2020;Neundorf and Pop-Eleches, 2020;Curtice and Behlendorf, 2021;Desposato et al, 2021;Wang, 2021). Yet, the literature tells us relatively little about how the above question could be answered.…”

“…As far as the effect of repression is concerned, this argument implies that repression will have heterogeneous effects between these two groups. For those who perceive themselves to be outcasts, repressions can further alienate them from the regime and even have a long-term dampening effect on their trust in political institutions and the government (Lawrence, 2016;Dinas and Northmore-Ball, 2020;Desposato et al, 2021;Wang, 2021). For those self-perceived regime insiders, however, the ability of the regime to clamp down on protest mobilizations and restore social order should have an opposite effect of boosting their confidence in the regime and its institutions.…”