Protest, empowerment, and voice: Exploring the electoral afterlife of the 2014 Bosnian popular assemblies

This article connects the literatures of psychological effects of protest (for participants and non-participants) and vote choice, identifying five voter pathways: staying, conversion, protest voting, vote spoiling, and alienation. On a general level, the study examines whether there is evidence of a longer-term impact of protest on elections, that is, a durable afterlife. The analysis employs a difference-in-differences approach using municipal council election results from Bosnia- Herzegovina (BiH) 2008–2020 to see whether protests and the short-lived citizen assemblies (‘plenums‘) in 2014 triggered changes in subsequent electoral results, and if so, whether these changes persisted. Specifically, the study investgates whether citizen-led direct-democratic mobilisation affected electoral results for the predominant Bosniak Party, Party for Democratic Action. More broadly, the article explores whether bottom-up mobilisation can initiate political change long after protest activities have ended, even in places that are controlled by ethno-nationalist elites such as in BiH.