Authors

Discussion

During nationwide mass mobilisations, is subnational variation in protest influenced by regional employment patterns? Based on debates in the literature, I explore whether protest events are more likely to occur, or are more frequent, in contexts where there are more middle-class or working class (specifically factory) employees. I also examine how levels of state employment interact with these two factors. My cases of protest highlight this puzzle: During the Ukrainian Euromaidan, a mainly middle-class protest movement led to the fall of the Yanukovych regime. However, in neighbouring Belarus, as citizens mobilized against falsified elections, workers in dozens of industrial enterprises protested. Using my original protest event catalogues for mobilisation in Ukraine and Belarus, alongside state statistics and employment data from the Bureau Van Dijk Orbis database,  I examine whether and how local patterns of industrial and middle-class employment, and state ownership in these two sectors, relate to sub-national variation during the first month of protest.