Expatriate citizens of countries under authoritarian rule have been increasingly engaging in protest against repression in their home countries. Whether such diaspora protests can boost social uprisings inside authoritarian countries, however, is yet to be analysed. I hypothesise that diaspora protests inspire protest against authoritarian rulers inside the home country by reducing political repression or providing the dissidents with a perception of political opportunity. To test this hypothesis, I use Iran as a case study of an authoritarian regime with a sizeable diaspora and notable protest surges in recent decades. Using daily protest data from 1996 to 2018, results show that protests against the Iranian regime by Iranian expatriates were followed by a significant increase in the chance of protest incidence inside Iran. This association is robust to a variety of modelling specifications and independent of the role of transnational organisational links between activists, which has been documented in the literature previously.

中文翻译：

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威权主义下的侨民抗议和社会起义

独裁统治国家的侨民越来越多地参与抗议本国的镇压活动。然而，这种侨民抗议是否会推动威权国家内部的社会起义还有待分析。我假设侨民抗议通过减少政治镇压或为持不同政见者提供政治机会的看法来激发对本国独裁统治者的抗议。为了检验这一假设，我以伊朗作为一个近几十年来拥有大量侨民和显着抗议浪潮的独裁政权的案例研究。使用1996年至2018年的每日抗议数据，结果显示，随着伊朗侨民对伊朗政权的抗议，伊朗境内发生抗议事件的几率显着增加。这种关联对于各种建模规范来说都是稳健的，并且独立于活动家之间跨国组织联系的作用，这在之前的文献中已有记录。