Violent Riots and South African Satisfaction with Democracy

The past decade has witnessed growing challenges to democracies around the world, with rising levels of democratic discontent and political violence. While a growing body of work has begun examining the determinants of satisfaction with democracy in European and American contexts, less is known about the African context. South Africa serves as a particularly fruitful case to study, as it shares many western-style institutions and elections, but has come to be known as a “violent democracy,” where citizens regularly engage in political violence to extract concessions and enforce government accountability. This study examines how exposure to protests and riots affects citizen satisfaction with democracy. Using geolocated data from four successive rounds of the Afrobarometer data as well as data from the Armed Conflict Location Event Data. I find that exposure to local violent riots correlates with reduced reports of satisfaction with democracy. I find that these results are robust, even when integrating measures of control against endogeneity into the models.