Social unrest in transition: examining civic participation and political polarization before and during COVID-19

Despite extensive research on social unrest during the COVID-19 pandemic, the shift in unrest dynamics is relatively understudied. This article explores how the pandemic reshaped social unrest by examining the relationship between civil society participation and political polarization across 158 countries from 2018 to 2022. Using protest event data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset (ACLED), I argue that the pandemic substantially changed unrest dynamics. . Random-effects negative binomial regression results show that the effect of civil society participation on both violent and non-violent events intensified during the pandemic compared to the earlier period. Similarly, the effect of political polarization on the number of events varied significantly across the two periods. The positive effect of polarization, especially on violent events, was particularly noticeable during the pre-pandemic period but disappeared in the latter period. Additional analyses with the ACLED COVID-19 Disorder Tracker further support these results. The findings indicate that the pandemic has altered the way civil society participation and political polarization impact social unrest and introduce two variables that help explain the country-level differences in collective action during the pandemic.Future research should further investigate factors that posit the pandemic as a contextual moderator of collective action.