Protest activity, Social Incentives, and Rejection sensitivity: Results from a survey experiment about tuition fees (original) (raw)
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Protest activity, RS, Bäck et al
People may engage in protest activity either because of collective incentives or selective incentives, or a combination of them. In this study we focus on the selective incentives part of the calculus of political participation, particularly the impact of the social dimension. We hypothesize that people will participate in demonstrations or other forms of protest, to a higher extent if they are afraid of rejection, but only if they feel that they have high social support for their own position. This hypothesis was supported in an online survey experiment where social support was manipulated. Results also revealed that individuals who were highly rejection sensitive were among the most likely to participate even though they did not believe protest activity to be an efficient way to bring about social change. This supports the notion that some individuals tend to engage in protest activity for purely social reasons. However it is still unclear whether these individuals are driven by an approach motivation to establish new social bonds or an avoidance motivation to escape possible social rejection.
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2014
This study examines the factors that affect an individual's decision to take an active part in social justice protests. We use data collected after the 2011 Israeli social justice protests against the continuing rise in the cost of living, the social order and power-structure in Israel. Our main hypotheses are based on the expressive behavior model, and suggest that active participation in protests produces expressive utility that changes the cost-benefit calculation in the decision to be active in social protests. The results show that individuals who decided to participate actively in the non-violent protest had low general confidence in the future of the Israeli society. The findings also suggest that active participants are less present-oriented, less risk averse, and have a higher interest in politics, compared to those who did not participate actively. In addition, the more active participants tend to live in rented homes, meaning that their self-interest in housing-related issues is high. Finally, we find that women and those who support a non-aggressive military policy were more likely to participate in protests. These results shed light on behavioral and sociological factors affecting the decision to protest, specifically in Israeli society.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
We find evidence that explicit (but not implicit) measures of general attitude towards protest uniquely predict normative and nonnormative political action tendencies, and behavior, over and above extant models of political action. Protest attitude uniquely predicts both the political action tendencies of members of disadvantaged groups and willingness to engage in solidarity-based action on behalf of such groups. Furthermore, we find some evidence that protest attitude is able to account for the effects of mobilization messages over a political issue; these messages increase political action tendencies by making attitude towards protest more positive. The results indicate that overall attitude toward protest reflects a wide array of affective, cognitive, and behavioral factors associated with protest that more specific, established predictors of collective political action do not tap. As such, general protest attitude offers an important addition to extant models of collective political action and efforts to examine the psychological processes underpinning political cognition and action.
Social Image, Networks, and Protest Participation
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017
Social motivation plays an important role in electoral participation, political contributions, and charitable donations. We examine the role of social image concerns in the decision to participate in political protests. We develop a dynamic model of protest participation, where sociallyminded individuals use protest participation to signal their type to the peers. We test predictions of the model using individual and city-level data from 2011-2012 political protests in Russia. We report several findings. First, list experiment results imply that social signaling motives indeed were important for the decision to participate in protests. Second, consistent with the model, protest participation was declining over time. Third, participation in online protest groups increased offline protest participation. Fourth, participation in protests was higher in cities with higher social capital. Finally, the importance of both online social networks and offline social capital for protest participation diminished over time, consistent with predictions of the model. Words: 10771. 1 We are grateful to Tiburon Research for invaluable help with conducting our survey, and to Sergey Chernov, Aleksander Malairev, and Natalya Naumenko for their kind assistance with data collection. We also thank
Protest Behavior in European Societies. The Role of Individual Incentives and the Political Context
Empirical research has provided different explanations for political protest. Yet, from a cost-benefit perspective the motivation for protest behavior still remains unclear. Why do people engage in protest activities, even though participation is costly and collective outcomes are available to everybody? This paper aims to provide an explanation for this paradox by analyzing which individual-level incentives foster protest participation, and by considering the specific political context in which protest activities take place. We rely mainly upon the European Social Survey (ESS) data from 2002–2003, which covers a large number of countries, and includes important items for measuring political protest. The findings suggest that both individual-level incentives and contextual features are crucial to take into account when explaining protest activity. More specifically, we find that collective and selective incentives motivate protest in most European countries, and that protest levels are higher in systems with proportional representation, in less fractionalized systems and in more polarized systems. Looking at interactions between contextual and individual-level factors, we find that people are less likely to be driven to protest by collective incentives in countries where left parties are in the cabinet.
Political Action as a Function of Grievances, Risk, and Social Identity: An Experimental Approach
Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 2018
Why would individuals engage in or support contentious politics? This question is challenging to answer with observational data where causal factors are correlated and difficult to measure. Using a surveyembedded experiment, we focus on three situational factors: grievances, risk, and identity. We also explore how individual differences in sociopolitical orientations-social dominance orientation (SDO) and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA)-impact action. Grievances influence engagement in and support for protests. Risk influences engagement in protest, but not support for it. Regardless of condition, SDO and RWA help explain why some people engage in protest while others do not, particularly within the same context.
Why Bother? Rethinking Participation in Elections and Protests
Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics, 2019
Why do vote-suppression efforts sometimes fail? Why does police repression of demonstrators sometimes turn localized protests into massive, national movements? How do politicians and activists manipulate people's emotions to get them involved? In this book we offer a new theory of why people take part in collective action in politics, and test it in the contexts of voting and protesting. We develop the idea that just as there are costs of participation in politics, there are also costs of abstention -- intrinsic and psychological, but no less real for that. That abstention can be psychically costly helps explain real-world patterns that are anomalies for existing theories, such as that sometimes increases in costs of participation are followed by more participation, not less. The book draws on a wealth of survey data, interviews, and experimental results from a range of countries, included the United States, Britain, Brazil, Sweden, and Turkey.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2023
Disadvantaged groups use different means to protest inequality. Normative protest is more likely when the societal context of inter-group inequality signals that there is opportunity for status improvement. Non-normative protest is more likely to occur in systems in which status improvement is unlikely. However, little is known about how advantaged groups react to (normative vs. non-normative) protest as a function of the likelihood for status improvement of the disadvantaged offered by the context (high vs. low). Four experiments (N = 1092) assessed endorsement of protest among advantaged group members using different operationalizations of likelihood for status improvement and type of protest in four different intergroup contexts. Advantaged group members scoring lower in self-investment in their group identity endorsed protest more when the form of protest matched likelihood for status improvement than when it did not. Specifically, less invested members most supported normative protest (i.e., marches, petitions) when likelihood for status improvement was high and non-normative protest (i.e., hacking, destruction of property) occurring in contexts in which status improvement was unlikely. Highly self-invested individuals tended to be unaffected by the form of protest or type of inequality. Mediated moderation analyses suggested that increased appraisals of illegitimacy of inequality explained why support (i.e. among the less invested) was higher when the form of protest fitted opportunity for societal improvement. Results suggest that those less committed to their advantaged position jointly consider type of protest and its context of occurrence when forming opinions on acceptability of disadvantaged protest.
Threat as a Motivator of Political Activism: A Field Experiment
Political Psychology, 2004
The research reported here examined the effects of two potential motivators of political activism-policy change threat and policy change opportunity-in a field experiment. Different versions of a letter were sent by a political lobbying organization to potential contributors. One version highlighted threats of undesirable policy changes, another version highlighted opportunities for desirable policy changes, and the third version did neither. Policy change threat increased the number of financial contributions made to the interest group, but policy change opportunity did not. Policy change opportunity increased the number of signed postcards returned to be sent to President Clinton, but policy change threat did not. These findings highlight the impact of interest group recruitment strategies on citizen responsiveness and demonstrate the need to account for sources of motivation in order to more fully understand when, why, and how citizens choose to become politically active.