Abstract

In repressive regimes, dissidents abstain from overt forms of resistance like collective action and anti-regime voting. Instead, hidden forms of everyday resistance become a less risky alternative to voice their dissent. This paper contextualizes and analyzes an everyday form of resistance in Hong Kong, an electoral autocracy that has been increasingly repressive since its crackdown on the 2019 Anti-Extradition Movement. In the context of Hong Kong, dissidents resist through habitualized consumer behavior in line with their dissent: they intentionally purchase from (buycott) pro-democracy businesses and avoid (boycott) pro-establishment businesses in their everyday consumption. Focusing on restaurants, this paper measures everyday resistance using original and novel data based on restaurant reviews from OpenRice, Hong Kong’s Yelp. Leveraging an event study design, it finds a persistent pattern that pro-democracy restaurants have been receiving more reviews and more favorable reviews than pro-establishment ones after 2019—suggesting that dissidents continue to resist in their everyday life, when public expression of political dissent has become taboo. Individual-level evidence from an original survey validates the strong tendency of buycotting pro-democracy businesses and boycotting pro-establishment businesses among dissidents, and text analysis of the restaurant reviews also confirms how daily dining choices are motivated by political dissent. Additional analyses further explore the spatial heterogeneity by protest violence and local constituencies. These findings highlight how observable acts of everyday resistance can reveal dissent in repressive contexts.