There has been a wide-spread belief that elections with a wide franchise following removal of an oppressive dictator lead to establishment of a government that is not vulnerable to mass protest. At the same time, most of the post-World War II non-constitutional exits of recently-installed autocratic leaders were caused by elite coups, rather than popular protests. The recent experience of Egypt, where the democratic post-Mubarak government, a result of the Arab Spring, collapsed after having had almost uninterrupted protests since its first day in office, offers a striking counterexample to both of these patterns. We demonstrate that this is a general phenomenon: the same technological shock, arrival of social media, that makes the incumbent vulnerable, lays foundation for continuous instability of the subsequent democratic government. Our theoretical model, which incorporates protest into a Downsian framework, takes into account specific features of modern protests: the significant role of social media and the absence of the partisan or personalized leadership during popular unrest. Case studies of the Arab countries with and without large-scale protests corroborate our theoretical findings.

Recent and popular developments of the so-called “Arab Spring” reached Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria in 2011, offering a unique opportunity to research the causes of the emergence of collective action. The empirical evidence leads us to a two-part puzzle: Why have some countries experienced collective action while others have not? Which are the causal mechanisms of the emergence of the collective action? This paper focuses on the period prior to the onset of collective action to examine its nature and dynamics in the light of the social movement theory. Its aim is twofold: on one hand, to revise the social movement theory to clarify the phenomenon and on the other, to analyse the causes of the emergence of collective action in Yemen and the prevalence of the status quo in Algeria. The concept of “collective action” is outlined based on necessary and sufficient conditions and family resemblance approach. Cases are studied using a process-tracing methodology to identify causal mechanisms in order to explain our outcome. Finally, the paper provides some insights to study the phenomenon in future research.

Drawing on both qualitative ethnographic fieldwork and experimental evidence from a survey using Facebook social networks, this paper examines collective action among first movers and their networks during the ArabSpring protests in Morocco. It finds that the regime’s efforts to police, suppress, and arrest political dissidents encouraged participation in or support for new protests. Specifically, the paper makes two arguments. First, it shows that activism is passed down from one generation to the next: the first movers in 2011 often came from families that suffered past human rights violations at the hands of the regime. A family history of repression increases a person’s willingness to engage in risky collective action. Second, it finds that repression during the Arab Spring was also counterproductive; information about the regime’s efforts to brutally police protests increased support for protest among first movers and their social networks. A regime that abuses its citizens’ human rights by jailing and attacking protestors creates incentives for its citizens to oppose it; these abuses can come back to haunt the regime long after repression occurs.

The goal of this article is to place the role of the social media in collective action within a more general theoretical structure using the events of the Arab Spring as a case study. Three theoretical principles are put forth all of which center around the idea that one cannot understand the role of any media in a political conflict without first considering the political context in which they are operating. The first principle states that: “Political variables are likely to be more important in explaining the extensiveness of a popular uprising than the overall penetration of the social media in a particular country”. The second principle is referred to as the “principle of cumulative inequality”. It states that: “Citizens who most need the media are the ones who find it the most difficult to exploit them.” The third and final theoretical principle states that: “A significant increase in the use of the new media is much more likely to follow a significant amount of protest activity than to precede it.” The three principles are examined using political, media, and protest data from 22 ArabCountries. The findings provide strong support for the validity of the claims.