Concessions, repression, and political protest in the Iranian Revolution

I investigate how and why the Shah's policies of accommodation and repression escalated the revolutionary mobilization of the Iranian population. Several major theories-micromobilization theory, value expectancy, and band-wagon (critical mass) models-are used to sort out the empirical relationships between protest behavior (violent and nonviolent), strikes, spatial diffusion, concessions, and repression in the year prior to the Shah's exit from Iran. Estimates from Poisson regression models show that repression had a short-term negative effect and a long-term positive effect on overall levels of protest via repression's influence on spatial diffusion. I infer that this pattern of effects stems from a combination of deterrent and micromobilization mechanisms. Concessions expanded the protests by accelerating massive urban strikes that in turn generated more opposition activity throughout Iran. Spatial diffusion was encouraged by government concessions and massive labor strikes. Mutually reinforcing relationships between concessions, strikes, and spatial diffusion indicate the significance of intergroup dynamics in the revolutionary process.