“This is what the Bolsheviks do”: How Democratic Politicians Use Foreign Revolutions to Attract Voters

Abstract

Revolution in one country can inspire protests in another country, demanding responses from elites seeking to maintain power. Scholars typically use a policy-centered approach to analyze these responses, focusing on how policy strategies of repression or co-optation are used to prevent revolution. But in democracies, political survival is also electoral success. This article therefore argues that studying the communicative signaling of political elites allows us to see another important response to foreign revolutions: how democratic politicians through speeches use foreign revolutions to attract revolution-wary voters. Building on recent legislative debate scholarship, the article develops a parliamentary speech signaling framework and demonstrates its usefulness by analyzing Danish elite responses to revolutions in the 1910s. This approach enables us to see how democratic politicians use foreign revolutions for electoral advantages, and it addresses a noted difficulty of previous research in clarifying whether co-optation or repression in democracies emerged as responses to revolutions.