Author Archive

Andy Buschmann

Andy Buschmann is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor as well as Oxford University. Currently, he is also a Southeast Asia Research Group Pre-Dissertation Fellow and, last year was a Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies Graduate Fellow. His work focuses on the interlinks between protest, authoritarianism, and public opinion. Geographically, he studies the Asia-Pacific region, in particular Myanmar and Hong Kong, where he applies mixed-methods research, triangulating surveys and experiments with comparative historical analysis.

As protests in Hong Kong have become more violent, have the demographics of the protesters changed? Political scientists have argued that a shift toward more violent protest action can alienate moderate protesters. Moderates, in this definition, are those who may share common cause with radicals (or those who embrace violent tactics) but reject those tactics. Once alienated, such moderate protesters tend to withdraw their support from a movement and may refrain from participating in protest action in the future. Hong Kong’s protests seem to have defied this trend. My surveys of protest participants find that the demographic profile of protesters has remained relatively constant even as violence has escalated in the demonstrations. Certain types of protesters who might be expected …