Population, Politics, and Protests: A Multilevel Analysis in African Cities

Why do some African cities experience higher rates of protest incidence than others? Numerous authors have highlighted the role of urbanisation and democratisation in determining cross-national variation in the rates urban protest. Yet understanding has been hindered by failures to measure mechanisms at the appropriate spatial scale, analyse a sufficiently representative sample of cities, to de-confound city and country-level factors, and to consider what it is about specific cities that shapes variation in protest incidence. This paper presents new evidence on the determinants of protest events in African cities by linking georeferenced data on urban settlements from the European Commission’s Global Human Settlement Layer Settlement Model Urban Centres Database (GHSL-UCDB) to the location of protest events taken from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset (ACLED). Fitting a series of multilevel regression models with cross-level effects, we simultaneously estimate variation in protest incidence as a function of city-level and country contextual factors and the interactions between them. Our results indicate that between city variation in protest incidence can be explained by a combination of city-specific and country-level contextual factors. These findings advance our understanding of how political and demographic factors interact to influence protest incidence in African cities.