Electoral Impacts of A Failed Uprising: Evidence from Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement

Electoral Studies, 2021, with Stan Wong

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This paper examines how a major anti-regime protest—the 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong—shaped electoral outcomes in the city. Using fine-grained constituency-level election data, we show that citizens living closer to the protest sites were more likely to shift away from the pro-democracy opposition in the subsequent legislative election. A one–standard deviation decrease in distance to the protest sites leads to a 3–6 percentage-point larger decline in the opposition's vote share. These patterns are robust to different measures of proximity, weighting strategies, alternative outcome definitions (e.g., ideology scores), and placebo tests based on pre-protest electoral outcomes. The findings challenge the common expectation that anti-regime protests always strengthen opposition coalitions; instead, proximity to disruptive contention can generate backlash that benefits the authoritarian-aligned camp.

To uncover the mechanisms behind this electoral shift, we combine a spatial difference-in-differences design with two independent public opinion surveys. Residents closer to the protest sites exhibit a higher rise in perceived economic insecurity, even though their actual incomes did not decline, suggesting that the protest triggered anxiety rather than material loss. Meanwhile, political efficacy increased city-wide, regardless of proximity, helping explain why voter turnout did not fall. Individual-level panel survey data confirm that low-income voters living near protest sites were especially likely to defect from the opposition, while pro-democracy "joiners" tended to be younger and more politically engaged. Together, the results show that even peaceful anti-regime protests can unintentionally weaken the opposition in the short run by heightening economic fears among bystanders, offering new insight into the political consequences of contentious collective action under authoritarianism.

Table 1: The Umbrella Movement increased the perceived economic insecurity among residents living closer to the protest sites even though it has no impacts on their real income.