Mobilizing Usual versus Unusual Protesters. Information Channel Openness and Persuasion Tie Strength in 71 Demonstrations in Nine Countries

ABSTRACT

Decades of research found that protest participation is unequally distributed over the population. The usual protesters are resourceful, skilled, and politically engaged. We theorize that “open channel” mobilization and mobilization via strong persuasion ties is able to bring unusual protesters to the streets. Additionally, we explore the contextual antecedents of both mobilization types. Results are based on large-scale protest survey data encompassing 71 protests from nine countries. We measure protester (un)usualness in terms of education, political interest, political efficacy and past participation. We find that mobilization via closed information channels and weak persuasion ties generally leads to the well-known skew in participation. Open information channels and strong persuasion ties, on the other hand, tend to decrease the probability of participants being usual suspects and increase the probability of participants being unusual suspects. In sum, not all mobilization fosters inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• Protest
• unequal participation
• mobilization
• Western Europe

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to all the members of the CCC-project for data gathering efforts and to the members of the M2P research group for valuable comments on a previous version of the paper. Data for this study were gathered by the collaborative research project “Caught in the act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation” (CCC-project) funded by the European Science Foundation (grant number 08-ECPR-001). Participating countries (and country coordinators) are Belgium (Stefaan Walgrave), Czech Republic (Ondrej Cisar; Katerina Vrablikova), Italy (Donatella della Porta), Spain (Jose-Manuel Sabucedo; Eva Anduiz), Sweden (Abby Peterson), Switzerland (Marco Giugni), The Netherlands (Bert Klandermans) and The United Kingdom (Clare Saunders; Chris Rootes).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. One of the reasons why so few studies looked into the connection between mobilization type and participant type, is the lack of data. Data about how exactly, via which channels and through which social ties, individuals are mobilized for protest are rare. To be sure, some studies of individual participation and protest did incorporate measures of micro-level mobilization but often these questions have been too general to specify the concrete mobilization process (for two exceptions, see: McAdam and Paulsen 1993; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995).

2. Note that the dataset initially contained 11,976 respondents. We decided to exclude almost four thousand who said they were asked to protest by “no-one”. We cannot classify these people as being asked by strong or by weak ties and, consequently, they cannot be attributed a sensible value on one of the two key variables of interest here (persuasion tie strength).

3. In our coding, closed channels prevail over open channels and strong persuasion ties prevail over weak ties. People who are informed via closed channels have distinct features. As soon as protesters mention they were informed via an organization, it does not matter that they have also been informed by open channels as they should display characteristics typically associated with usual protesters. For the Information variable, 73% mentioned more than one information channel and the coding decision has consequences for the results we present. For the Persuasion variable only 28% mention more than one persuasion tie and the coding hardly affects the results.

4. Calculated by taking the score for each demonstration, subtracting the mean, divided by the standard deviation ((x-µ)/σ). This results in standard scores for each demonstration that indicate to what extent the demonstration’s information channels and persuasion ties were below or above the mean.

5. Although demonstrators are nested in demonstrations, intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) are close to zero making multilevel modeling not necessary. Specifically, for both political interest and efficacy ICCs were .01; for models on education and past participation ICCs were .12 and .11. For these latter models we decided to run models with robust standard errors, to be consistent with the modeling strategies of the other models. Additionally, Brant tests for all models indicated the proportional odds assumption to be violated. We ran generalized ordered logit models in Stata using the gologit2 command with npl specification (see Williams 2006).

6. For instance, persuasion tie strength only significantly matters when comparing the highest to the middle and lowest educated. Information channel openness, on the other hand, significantly matters for political efficacy in model 1, 2 and 3. See Appendix C for a full overview.

Additional information

Funding

Data for this study were gathered by the collaborative research project “Caught in the act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation” (CCC-project) funded by the European Science Foundation [grant number 08-ECPR-001].

Notes on contributors

Stefaan Walgrave

Stefaan Walgrave ([email protected]) is a professor of political science at the University of Antwerp. His work focuses on protest and political participation, on media and politics, on public opinion, and on political representation.

Ruud Wouters

Ruud Wouters ([email protected]) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp. His work focuses on protest participation and on the impact of protest on media, politics and public opinion. His current research examines how protest manages to affect the scope of conflict.

Pauline Ketelaars

Pauline Ketelaars ([email protected]) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp. Her work focuses on political communication and street protests. Currently, she is working on a project about the practice and strategic effectiveness of communication timing by politicians.