What is the relationship between the changes in conflict violence and the public’s political participation in democratic processes? More specifically, does a deterioration in militarized violence bring citizens out into the streets and encourage them to get involved in protests, and, alternatively, do military gains/decrease in violence make the public more politically quiescent? This paper pursues four related goals: 1) introduce a unique time series event dataset of political activism–proxied through protests–and a granular assembly of various conflict-related violence activity in Armenia; 2) use the dataset to identify patterns of protest dynamics against the backdrop of ongoing conflict violence; 3) discuss a causal strategy and assumptions made by the estimation model that is sensitive to the granular nature of the data; 4) apply event study design to the data to test the causal linkage between the occurrence of violence and the likelihood of a protest event. Preliminary findings suggest that the nature and scope of protest activities change in those years when there are prominent changes in conflict violence, however, the sequencing and the causal relationship between conflict and protest occurrence is more tenuous. By contrast, I found that greater involvement in conflict processes from outside actors precedes a surge in protest activity in a statistically significant way.
