Higher Education and Contentious Political Behavior in Tehran, 2022

• In Event: Urban Violence and Political Contestation in the Middle East

Abstract

Why do protests emerge and endure in some localities but not others? What explains the spatial variation of protest incidences? This study focuses on urban protests in the city of Tehran, Iran's capital and largest city, to explain why protests emerged and endured in some neighborhoods but not others. I focus on the role of education and the mechanisms through which it shapes contentious political behavior. The main argument of this study is that education increases grievances because they are politically informed and better familiar with democratic norms. However, they have limited opportunities to translate their preferences into policy due to the absence of genuine representative and participatory institutions. As a result, education is likely to motivate citizens into anti-government collective action. I use an original geocoded dataset of 354 protest events in Tehran at the neighborhood level, collected from Persian sources, to test this argument. The findings show that protests are more likely to break out and continue in neighborhoods with a larger percentage of college-educated citizens. They are robust to including a variety of control variables as well as alternative specifications.

Author

• Peyman Asadzade, Harvard University