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

• Author: Scott W. Desposato,Jason Y. Wu,Gang Wang
• Published date: 01 December 2021
• Date: 01 December 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0010414021997171
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414021997171

Comparative Political Studies

© The Author(s) 2021

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0010414021997171

journals.sagepub.com/home/cps

Article

The Long-Term Impact

of Mobilization and

Repression on Political

Trust

Scott W. Desposato1*, Gang Wang2*,

and Jason Y. Wu3*

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.

Keywords

China, trust, social capital, non-democratic regimes

1UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

2Wuhan University, Hubei, China

3Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

*These authors contributed equally to this work.

Corresponding Author:

Gang Wang, School of Journalism & Communication, Wuhan University, Luojia Hill, Hongshan

District, Wuhan, Hubei Province, 430072, China.

Email: wangucb@whu.edu.cn

997171CPSXXX10.1177/0010414021997171Comparative Political StudiesDesposato et al.

research-article2021

2021, Vol. 54(14) 2447 –2474

2448 Comparative Political Studies 54(14)

2 Comparative Political Studies 00(0)

Introduction

The leaders of authoritarian regimes try to elicit cooperation from their citi-

zens by delivering public services, buying off potential malcontents, and

signaling strength, but when these measures fall short, dictators and their

associates often resort to repression. Most of the time, autocrats are able to

target their repressive efforts toward specific individuals or organizations,

but if the opponents of the regime are able to coordinate and organize mass

protests, autocrats frequently respond with violence (Davenport, 2007;

Gerschewski, 2013; Greitens, 2016).

The short-term effects of mobilization and repression are readily observ-

able: the regime either manages to hang on to power, or its leaders are ejected

from office. A new wave of scholarship has also begun to investigate the

long-term effects of mobilization and repression by gathering data on the

attitudes and experiences of individuals who lived through these violent epi-

sodes, or on their descendants. These studies have focused on cases where the

repressive government has left the scene (Balcells, 2012; Lupu and Peisakhin,

2017; Rozenas and Zhukov, 2019), or where the victims of repression have

been officially rehabilitated (Wang, 2019).

What is more mysterious is the long-term legacy of these popular move-

ments when the repressive regime remains in power and the movement itself

remains taboo. In most cases, elites will weave narratives about repression

into collective historical memory for instrumental or ideological reasons

(Halbwachs, 1992; Wang, 2012). These narratives play a key role in giving

these repressive episodes their political force. What is the impact of a mass

movement that has been written out of collective memory?

In this paper we examine the long-term impact of a prominent example of

this class of mass movement: the Tiananmen Square protests in China. For

six weeks in the spring of 1989, students, intellectuals, and workers demon-

strated to demand political reforms and accountability from their leaders. The

protests began when thousands gathered to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang,

a reformist Party leader who had been purged two years before. When the

Party failed to step in immediately to break up the movement, signaling divi-

sion at the top, the demands and aspirations of the protesters grew, and simi-

lar protests appeared in dozens of Chinese cities. The resulting political

standoff was only broken when the Party high command sent in the army to

clear Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds or perhaps thousands of protesters

in the process.

As the Tiananmen protests grew larger, government officials who had

been sympathetic to the students’ concerns, such as General Secretary Zhao

Ziyang, were removed from office. After the crackdown, the party poured