What factors determine state response to socioeconomic protest movements? In countries where party systems and welfare institutions are weak or co-opted, protests, strikes, and sit-ins are often the primary means by which distributive demands are made on the state. This study leverages comparative case studies of mobilization and state response in the phosphate mining sectors of Tunisia and Morocco to investigate how democratizing revolts – “successful” or otherwise – shift the willingness of states to offer redistributive concessions to social mobilization. From parallel grassroots protest movements gaining scant concessions in 2008 and 2009, the stories of the Tunisian and Moroccan mining town rebellions diverged swiftly following the 2011 Arab revolutions. In Morocco, roughly one billion dollars were diverted from the accounts of phosphate mining firm Groupe OCP to build public “skills centers” in each of the mining towns; to offer paid training courses and entrepreneurship grants to local youth; and to better equip provisional and recreational facilities in the mining towns. In Tunisia, despite myriad rounds of negotiation between the state and social protesters, the envisioned parallel reinvestment plan never came to fruition. This paper uses extensive interview and documentary evidence collected over fifteen months of fieldwork to unpack these divergent trajectories. I argue in short that in the wake of the February 20th movement, elite threat perceptions vis-à-vis protest were elevated, in turn lowering the threshold of mobilization at which elites were willing to grant social concessions. Surviving elites used broad-based concessions to demobilize mass opposition while avoiding political reforms. In Tunisia, after democratization, elites no longer uniformly aimed to demobilize protest movements in service of regime longevity. Instead, imperatives of coalition-building in a new democracy prompted elites to undermine opponents' attempts at social negotiation and to channel exclusive concessions to smaller, well-organized protest groups capable of lending political support.