Protests As Accountability Mechanism: Theory and Empirical Evidence of Brazil Mass Protest
Abstract: Citizens have used mass protests in democratic countries in order to signal their preferences or even to show their general dissatisfaction with the incumbent government. We propose a theory of protests as a Bayesian persuasion mechanism and we ask what are the conditions such that protests can be an efficient tool for accountability. We think about accountability in two ways. First, we see accountability purely as persuasion, as incumbents responding to the demands from the street. Secondly, we think about accountability in the sense of citizens reelecting incumbents that are responsive to the demands of the street with higher probability. We show that protests that don’t have a clear demand – and so may face a noisy communication channel, are not only less efficient, but they can be ex-ante inefficient as persuasion mechanism. Moreover, we show that less clear demands also lead to citizens replacing more the incumbent, which will be perceived as less responsive to the demands from the street. We then examine the effects of the large street protests that took place in Brazil in 2013 in both voters and federal legislators behavior. Consistent with the model, we find that there is heterogeneous effect of protests in terms of allocation of amendments related to protests demands, proposal of bills and presence in plenary sessions. Moreover, on average, protests reduced the probability of reelection of the incumbent. The data also allowed us to see interesting features of voters following the protests, such as decrease in turnout, increase in ”protest votes” (null votes), and decrease in incumbents’ vote share.
