Cognition and protest in democratic and authoritarian regimes, 1981–2020

Whereas most theories of why the masses protest in democratic and authoritarian regimes involve some psychological or ‘cognitive’ element, major theories that include them (a) deemphasize the structural conditions and (b) posit an explicit structure and cognition model but lack data to test its propositions across nations and time. This article synthesizes cognition-themed theories of democratic culture, political process theory’s cognitive liberation, and the structural cognitive model’s incentives. I test this synthetic theory in a specific way: that democratization and social spending interact with cognition in terms of external political efficacy and support for equitable economic redistribution to increase protest potential. I employ a three-level cross-national time-series model on the World Values Survey/European Values Study integrated dataset (1981–2020), consisting of democratic and authoritarian-leaning countries. I find that the three cognitive theories are complementary and that the interaction of structural changes with micro-level cognition has nuanced associations with protest potential.