Abstract
I explore how legitimation of authoritarian governments affects the anti-authoritarian social movements opposing them. By combining the existing theories of both authoritarian legitimation literature and social movement literature, I developed a new theoretical framework that understands legitimacy as the association between a citizen’s identity, benefits, and political obligation and sees political stability as the equilibrium of legitimation and repression/cooptation measures. Anti-government protests, then, are the result of this legitimation equilibrium breaking down and challenged by an alternative vision of the opposition. I use two case studies to show the process of legitimacy shocks developing into mass protests on the streets in two authoritarian regimes. Specifically, the case of the 2017-2019 anti-Maduro protest in Venezuela shows delegitimation as caused by performance and personalism factors, while 2019-2020 anti-extradition protest in Hong Kong focused on dissatisfactions with procedures and identity conflicts. This thesis shows the capacity of the new framework to explain anti-authoritarian protests, but the detailed relationship between delegitimation and the mobilisation and sustenance of social movement is more complicated.