Do People Protest for Democracy? Investigating A Democratic Theory of Protest Participation in the 2018 Armenia’s Protest

This paper studies the role of democratic support in relation to protest participation in non-democratic regimes. The democratic support theory suggests that strong support for democracy on the individual level makes people more likely to join democratic protests. Using Bayesian process-tracing, I investigate the theory in the case study of democratic mass mobilisation in Armenia in 2018. Overall, the findings from Armenia’s case study shows that democratic support plays a key role in motivating people to join democratic protests in non-democracies when the risks are high, and the benefits are unclear.