No dia 13 de fevereiro, Yuko Sato (Democracy Institute - Central European University) será a oradora do seminário do Grupo de Investigação SPARC sobre o tema Crisis of Democracy? Targeted Protest and Affective Polarization. A partir das 14h30, na Sala 2 do ICS-ULisboa e online.

My ongoing book project, Crisis of Democracy?: Targeted Protest and Affective Polarization, systematically examines the consequences of protests on the stability of democracy. My central argument is that protests serve as focal events that may change voters’ political perceptions. I seek to expand the social identity theory to mass polarization by theorizing and testing how political protest may enhance individual partisan identities. Political protests provide the public with open information containing a specific political message about targeted candidates or parties. Accordingly, exposure to protests may activate pre-existing sympathy or antipathy against the targeted group at the individual level and ultimately trigger affective polarization. To test this argument, I utilize a range of quantitative analyses, including time-series and cross-national studies and survey analysis with a natural experiment. I also triangulate quantitative methods with qualitative data gathered during my fieldwork in Brazil. The findings have implications for understanding the impact of protests on the polarization process and destabilization of democracy.

Yuko Sato is a postdoctoral researcher at the Democracy Institute, Central European University, and a research associate at the Varieties of Democracy Institute. Her research focuses on popular protests, voting behavior, democratization, and autocratization, with a regional focus on Latin America. Her previous research has appeared in academic journals and publishers, including Political Research Quarterly, Policy Studies Journal, Democratization, and Oxford University Press.