As a prominent form of state violence against civilians, protest policing represents the type of coercion that "liberal" autocrats seek to minimize. Departing from aggregate notions of "mass threat" that dominate studies of authoritarian response to contention, this paper develops an event-level model of protest policing centering the role of social movement organizations (SMOs) in shaping elite threat perceptions and, hence, the likelihood that protests will face state violence. More than public protest per se, I argue that liberal autocrats fear the rise of autonomous, national-level organizations capable of providing unregulated channels for citizen claim-making. Having forsworn the ability to control which networks become active as SMOs, liberal autocrats use protest policing to dissuade citizens from mobilizing with autonomous organizations and to protect the near-monopoly of embedded organizations over contention. I illustrate these arguments with unique protest event data from Morocco. I draw implications for the durability of liberalized regimes. This dataset underwent an independent verification process that replicated the tables and figures in the primary article. For the supplementary materials, verification was performed solely for the successful execution of code. The verification process was carried out by the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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