2019/10/22 by Ronggui Huang, Xiaoyi Sun · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Political Conflict and Governance #China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance #Qualitative Comparative Analysis Research #Elite #Contentious politics #Authoritarianism #Mediation #China #Politics #Social movement #Situated #Political science #Political economy #Political communication #Social media #Sociology #Democracy #Law
paper · doi:10.1080/14742837.2019.1682539
openalex publication_date 2019/10/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
Existing studies of protest outcomes have focused on the effects of organizational characteristics, disruptive tactics, and political opportunity structures. However, most studies, especially those situated in Western democracies, fail to adequately account for the paths to successful protests in authoritarian regimes like China because of the structural differences between the two types of regimes. By incorporating insights from studies of protests in China and communication studies, this article extends the political mediation model and argues that the success of protests is shaped by the tripartite relations among protest forcefulness, favorable political contexts, and media exposure. In face of joint occurrence of elite support and media exposure, large size of protest is sufficient, whilst large size and disruptive actions are required when media exposure is present but elite support is absent. This result shows that the effectiveness of protest characteristics is dually mediated by political and media conditions. This study not only enhances our understandings of protest outcomes in China but also brings scholarly dialogue between social movement studies and communication studies so as to enrich the literature of protest outcomes.