DEMOCRACY PROTESTS: ORIGINS, FEATURES, AND SIGNIFICANCE.

• Author: Campbell, Alexander Chen

A Review of Democracy Protests: Origins, Features, and Significance

By Dawn Brancati

(Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 228 pages.

What causes people to demonstrate for democratic change? What tactics do governments use to counter or co-opt these demands? Under what conditions do protests produce real democratization? Dawn Brancati's monograph seeks to answer these questions and others using a comprehensive dataset of 180 countries from 1989 to 2011. On the heels of the failure of the Arab Spring and a general decline in democracy, this work carries even greater importance to scholars and activists trying to understand why protestors succeed or fail in effecting political change.

Brancati aims to characterize democracy protests, which she narrowly defines as mass demonstrations in support of democratic elections, in terms of size, organization, success, and relation to triggers like economic crises and elections. She also investigates underlying factors that predispose countries to democracy protests and the range of government responses. With thorough analysis, Brancati argues that democracy protests tend to be small, common, carefully organized, and relatively successful at achieving political reform. The recent examples of the Arab Spring, while well-known, are thus atypical in almost every aspect. Her findings on the relationship between democracy protests and countries' economies are of particular interest. As might be expected, there is a strong correlation between economic crises and calls for democracy. However, counter to modernization theorists' arguments, economic development and popular perceptions of economic well-being actually make mass demonstrations for democracy less likely.

By carefully parsing a large dataset, Brancati highlights numerous useful relationships and avoids making grand causal claims. She discusses individual examples throughout the book but focuses more on large-scale statistical analysis than case studies. Her work suggests a messier, more bottom-up explanation of democratization than the picture offered by recent elite-led, development-driven theories. For example, Brancati contends that participants in democracy protests rarely value the philosophical abstraction of democratic government--more often, people want a particular incumbent out of office or a higher standard of living. To many, democracy is a means rather than an end. And her finding that no correlation exists between...