Under what conditions do pro-democracy movements and policy-based movements build coalitions to challenge authoritarian regimes?

Pro-democracy movements challenge the political regime itself — they target authoritarian rule, demand systemic change, and threaten the government’s hold on power. Policy-based movements pursue narrower, concrete grievances: land seizures, labor violations, environmental harm, and advocate for incremental, “within-system” solutions. These movements coexist within the same authoritarian contexts, but they do not automatically ally. The central puzzle of this book is when and why they do.

I argue that blame attribution is the key. When policy-based movement participants attribute their grievances to the national government rather than to local officials, they share a common adversary with pro-democracy movements. That shared target creates the strategic alignment that makes coalition-building sensible and its benefits clear. When blame stops at local officials, policy movements remain isolated, pursuing narrow claims that never fuse into broader challenges to the regime.

But blame attribution is not random. I show that it is structured by institutional characteristics, especially authoritarian regime type. In competitive authoritarian regimes — such as Malaysia prior to 2018, Cambodia, and Russia — where multiparty elections for chief executives exist, the national government is highly visible, channeling blame upward even for localized problems. In full authoritarian systems like Vietnam and China, where multiparty elections do not exist and citizens have no right to choose their national leaders, local governments rather than the national government are the visible face of power, keeping policy movements focused on local targets and local remedies. Regime type, in other words, does not just constrain dissent — it quietly shapes the cognitive landscape in which movements form, attribute blame, and decide who to fight alongside.

Yet this is not a story of immutable constraints. Even in full authoritarian regimes such as Vietnam and China, blame can shift upward when grievances persist, when national failures become impossible to deny, or when state complicity is exposed. When the regime is unable to prevent the shift from going upward, new opportunities for coalition building between policy-based and pro-democracy movements emerge. For example, drawing on the 2016 Formosa environmental disaster in Vietnam, I show how local protests became a nationwide challenge once citizens recognized the central government’s role in the cover-up — and how that upward shift opened new coalition opportunities between policy-based and pro-democracy movements.

To make these arguments, I combine cross-national protest data from East Asia, survey experiments, and qualitative interviews in Vietnam and Malaysia, tracing the mechanisms that link blame attribution, coalition formation, and the broader dynamics of contention under authoritarian rule.