Abstract:Using two unusual surveys, this study analyzes participation in the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, comparing participants with revolution supporters, opponents, counter-revolutionaries, and the apathetic/inactive. As the analysis shows, most revolutionaries were weakly committed to the revolution's democratic master narrative, and the revolution's spectacular mobilizational success was largely due to its mobilization of cultural cleavages and symbolic capital to construct a negative coalition across divers… Show more
“…The first observation is the trend in regime types. The Polity IV scores for Ukraine show that Ukraine has had an anocratic regime type for years (Beissinger 2013). As observers have noted, Russia has become more anocratic over time as well, and this transition toward anocracy in both states is consistent with the aggregate results that associate an increased risk of irredentism among anocratic dyads.…”
“…The first observation is the trend in regime types. The Polity IV scores for Ukraine show that Ukraine has had an anocratic regime type for years (Beissinger 2013). As observers have noted, Russia has become more anocratic over time as well, and this transition toward anocracy in both states is consistent with the aggregate results that associate an increased risk of irredentism among anocratic dyads.…”
“…Mobilization in these conditions spans, for example, Lithuania in the Soviet period (Petersen 2001), El Salvador in the 1970s-1980s , Lebanon in the 1980s , Sierra Leone in the 1990s (Humphreys and Weinstein 2008), and most recently Ukraine (Beissinger 2013). The Abkhaz case…”
Section: Social Structures and Mobilizationmentioning
Research on civil war mobilization emphasizes armed group recruitment tactics and individual motivations to fight, but does not explore how individuals come to perceive the threat involved in
“…However, in the identification of guilty parties in a major transgression, the narrative has the potential to bring into existence a pragmatic coalition of otherwise disparate actors -a "negative coalition" -whose common bond is its adversarial status in relation to a designated foil (Coser 1956;Beissinger 2013). 11 Two characteristics of CTs in particular make them useful as a coordinating device for elites in times of institutional flux: salience and focality.…”
Section: Narratives and Collective Action In Tumultuous Timesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Yet, the flipside is that they act as a focal point of unity that can have a stabilizing effect on politics. The unity does not last forever; when disparate factions come together out of common enemies, this is not a durable form of cohesion (Beissinger 2013). Political squabbling indeed occurred in Kyrgyzstan throughout the period when the narrative was still fresh, and new fixations dominated politics as the 2010 events receded into the past.…”
Section: Conclusion: the Virulent Virtues Of Conspiracymentioning
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