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The paper shows that sustained popular protest is a recurrent feature in many authoritarian regimes and that a regime type strongly shapes its characteristics. Popular protest often leads to important changes in the personal composition and policies of elites, which considerably affect the structure and operation of authoritarian regimes, and at times produce regime change. Evidence is provided from authoritarianism in Poland and Yugoslavia, in which sustained protests contributed to the fall of communism, and from competitive authoritarian regimes in post-communist Serbia and Ukraine, which were repeatedly undermined by protest waves and brought to an end by pressure from below'.