Second, the dynamics we analyze provide an important alternative to existing supply-side explanations of movement party success. Existing work focuses on movement parties themselves. But our framework sheds light on the extent to which voters respond to movement parties.

Our findings contribute to key debates in the social sciences. First, we show that protest movements can impact electoral outcomes. Failed uprisings can have a substantial and impactful afterlife - even in a context where governing parties are entrenched and rule collusively.

What drives this finding? Where governing parties were weaker and less present - which we proxy with turnout in the 2009 legislative election - the effect of exposure to protest on support for opposition-aligned lists was substantially higher.

We find that the uprising resulted in a 1.9 percentage point increase in support for the opposition - a 17% increase. We rule out the possibility that the effects were driven by district-specific dynamics, pre-uprising differences, and other confounders.

We combine these data with locality-level election results from the 2018 and 2022 legislative elections in Lebanon. We use a difference-in-differences design to analyze the effects of the Revolution on support for movement parties.

Our data comes from a unique event dataset - collected by CeSSRA - that documents the precise location of all protest events that took place during the uprising. Since 2017, CeSSRA has monitored and documented protest events in each locality throughout the country.

The October Revolution began on October 17, 2019, soon after the government announced a decision to implement a series of taxes on gasoline, tobacco, and VoIP calls on messaging applications like WhatsApp. The same day, protests erupted throughout the country.

We focus on the “party-movement nexus” in Lebanon, where an oversized governing coalition consisting of several parties has governed collusively since 2005. We examine the consequences of protest outcomes in the aftermath of the 2019 “October Revolution.”

Recently, movement parties have upended support for traditional parties and contributed to forms of electoral instability in many cases. Movement parties combine growing dissatisfaction with traditional parties and anti-systemic protest - in both democracies and autocracies.