The participatory legacy of mobilization and repression: evidence from a student movement

Studies of the participatory legacies of social movements in democratic settings often find that the individuals who take part in these movements remain more likely to engage in politics, decades later. What is the participatory legacy of social movements in authoritarian regimes, where they are often repressed and erased from public memory? Understanding such impacts is challenging due to self-selection and severe censorship. In this paper, we address both challenges with a unique design, comparing the behavior of individuals who began college just before and just after a massive student movement. This design allows us to measure exposure to the movement and the subsequent state crackdown without directly asking respondents and also addresses endogeneity by predicting exposure using an exogenous indicator, birthdate. We find that exposure to the movement increased participation in elections, reduced participation in protest and lobbying, and had no impact on conventional participation. We argue that social movements can continue to shape patterns of political participation in authoritarian regimes, decades after being crushed.