Preferences for the scope of protests

Miquel Pellicer, Eva Wegner and Alexander De Juan
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Eva Wegner: School of Politics & International Relations, University College Dublin
Alexander De Juan: Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz

No 223, SALDRU Working Papers from Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town

Abstract: This paper studies a dimension of protest largely overlooked in the literature: protest scope, that is, whether protests seek large, structural, changes for a large share of the population or focus on small-scale improvements for small groups. We argue that this protest dimension is relevant for understanding the political consequences of protests. We show empirically that protests vary substantially in scope and that scope is not collinear with other protest dimensions, such as size, motive, or tactics. We explore drivers of individual preferences for protest scope with a survey experiment in two South African townships. We find that respondents made to feel more efficacious tend to support protests of broader scope. This effect operates via a social psychology channel whereby efficacy leads people to assign blame for their problems to more systemic causes.

Keywords: Protest Dimensions; Political Behaviour; Social Psychology; Survey Experiment; Efficacy; South Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp and nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ldr:wpaper:223

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