Essays On The Relationship Between Political Representation And Protest Behavior

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b3200015

This dissertation examines the relationship between political representation and protest behavior with the aim of contributing to the broader literature on political participation. The central theme of this dissertation builds on the comparison of protesting as a form of political participation with voting. Thus, each of the three chapters of this dissertation refers to electoral behavior. In that regard, the dissertation offers a deeper understanding of the roles played by these distinct types of political action in achieving democratic equality, accountability, and responsiveness. While emphasizing the relationship between elections and protest, I pay particular attention to the representational inequality that election outcomes create. In the first chapter, I examine whether protesting can complement or substitute voting as a response to the inefficiency of elections in providing equal levels of representation for all citizens. I measure representational inequality with individuals’ ideological distance from the government’s position. The results show that protesting can both complement and substitute voting as a response to increasing representational deprivation. In the second chapter, I rely on the size of the parties in governments and opposition as an alternative measure of representational deprivation and find that voters of smaller government and opposition parties protest more than bigger parties. In the third chapter, I focus on the extent to which protesting is preferred to a better alternative to express political preferences through voting. In that chapter, I manipulate individuals’ protest potentials through a conjoint survey experiment by providing scenarios with different election times and chances of winning of respondents’ preferred parties. The results indicate that the protest potential of the survey respondents is higher prior to elections, a finding that contradicts the hypotheses of the chapter.