Remembering the counterrevolution: disappointment, denial, and demobilization

While scholars carefully study when revolutions succeed and how they are overturned, far less attention has been paid to the public's experience of revolution and counterrevolution as well as their subsequent effect on political attitudes and behaviour. We explore this question in Egypt, an important contemporary case of successful revolution in 2011 that was then reversed in a 2013 counterrevolution. We analyse data from an experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey that randomly primed one third of respondents to remember the country's 2011 revolutionary uprising, another third to remember the 2013 counterrevolutionary coup, and a final third that served as a pure control. Those asked to remember the coup report significantly lower levels of trust, feelings of voter efficacy, and participation in future elections and protest behaviours. Additional analyses demonstrate that how people remember the revolution and its reversal matters. First, those who reported feeling most disappointed by the events they were asked to recall were most affected by the primes. In addition, those who frequently consume state media, where the revolution has been alternately demonized and erased, were most demobilized by the primes. Our findings contribute to growing literatures on the political effects of collective memory, emotions and state-controlled media on politics.