Read on Twitter
I put together a some brief thoughts on the recent electoral #Belarusprotests from the perspective of someone who studies election manipulation. Blog post here: https://www.colejharvey.com/2020/08/17/post-election-protest-in-belarus/ and a short #polisciresearch 
follows:
follows:
First a disclaimer--not a Belarus expert. For that expertise, there are people doing great work to explain the situation: @HannaLiubakova, @OlgaDryndova, @kshmatsina, @TadeuszGiczan, @MRohava, and my former DC colleague @vcharnysh
For me, the events of the past few weeks have been deeply inspirational as someone who cares about liberal democracy, and fascinating as a scholar of election manipulation and protest. They highlight the biggest puzzle in the field, in my view:
Many formal models hold that mass protest is the main deterrent to rigged elections (see papers by @anthlittle, @BMagaloni, and more).
But we also know that mass protest election manipulation is rare ( https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0010414009332131), and manipulation itself is common (see work by @AlbertoSimpser). So what gives? Why does the threat of protest regularly fail to deter manipulation?
Put another way, when such protests do happen--as in Belarus--how do we explain it? In this case, two factors come to mind (and I'm sure there are more!):
First, the decision by the #Lukashenko govt to exclude any credible challenger except Tikhanoskaya from the ballot gave the opposition a chance to unite. See this interesting new paper by @dstreisman https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055420000180 on authoritarian mistakes like this
Second, my work with @PaulaMukherjee found that elections primarily characterized by *fraud*--rather than tools like vote-buying or voter pressure--are more likely to result in protest: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/government-and-opposition/article/methods-of-election-manipulation-and-the-likelihood-of-postelection-protest/CD08A891E3804C45D28F31E07828AD00
This is because rigging the vote on paper requires little in the way of resources or organizational capacity, making it a very weak signal of the kind of party strength that @AlbertoSimpser identifies as important for deterring protest
Finally, I think we need to go deeper to understand what motivates large numbers of people to defend clean elections in the absence of organization by institutionalized parties (which seems a fair description of the Belarus protests).
Here, I think social psychology will provide important insights, and I look forward to conducting a pair of survey experiments around the US 2020 election to better understand citizen attitudes toward allegations of unfairness is elections.
If we know when and why people take risks to demand fair elections, we'll better understand authoritarian politics, yes. But we'll also know how better to defend democracy where it is eroding. This is important work, and I'd love to discuss with others
