Democratic institutions channel contention into electoral forms while autocracies push it underground

Evidence

Second, democratic regimes draw contentious claim-making toward their prescribed and tolerated forms of expression because access to power and recognition regularly pass through effective uses of those forms; thus electoral campaigns and sessions of legislative assemblies become foci of claim-making, even on the part of contenders that currently exercise little or no power. High-capacity, nondemocratic regimes, in contrast, typically exclude contentious issues and actors from prescribed and tolerated forms of claim-making, with the consequence that dissidents make their claims either by covert use of tolerated performances such as public ceremonies or by deliberate adoption of forbidden performances such as armed attacks. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 447

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

Related

• Democracy enables bargaining over contention boundaries that autocrats suppress (similarity 0.86)
• Democratization always results from and generates extensive contention (similarity 0.84)
• High-capacity mobilization hits the regime directly while low-capacity contention rarely does (similarity 0.79)
• Laws of contention vary by regime type and era. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Democracy enables bargaining over contention boundaries that autocrats suppress #corroborates (0.88) — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1311