Abstract

Why does repression sometimes suppress anti-government protest and at other times catalyze mass mobilization against the state? Existing accounts conceptualize repression primarily as an increase in the cost of dissent, yet they offer limited insight into the mechanisms through which state control reshapes citizens' political behavior. This paper develops an access-based framework that shifts the focus from how much repression a state employs to how repression restructures the channels through which citizens interact with the state and with one another. The framework distinguishes two dimensions of political access: vertical access, the institutionalized pathways linking citizens to state authorities, and horizontal access, the communicative and associational linkages among citizens themselves. Vertical closure transforms the direction of grievances by breaking down the state's grievance absorption mechanism, redirecting dissatisfaction from specific policies toward the regime as such. Yet this reattribution alone does not produce anti-government protest; mobilization requires horizontal access that enables coordination and collective action. Anti-government protest is therefore most likely under a specific configuration: restricted vertical access combined with open horizontal access. The framework further theorizes how the sequence and tempo of access closure generate distinct protest trajectories, including an inverted-U pattern at intermediate levels of repression. These expectations are tested through cross-national time-series analysis and a process-tracing case study of Kazakhstan's January 2022 protests. The findings contribute to debates on the repression-dissent nexus, political opportunity structures, and democratic backsliding by specifying the configurational logic through which repression produces regime-directed contention.