EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Mobilising ‘Minutemen’: Predicting Public Support for Anti-Immigration Activism in the United States

Matthew Ward

Sociological Research Online, 2013, vol. 18, issue 4, 195-212

Abstract: Advances in social movement research conceptualise micromobilisation as – at least – a two-step sequential process in which willingness to participate must first be generated and then translated into actual participation. However, such research often ignores a more fundamental first step in this process: the generation of movement support. I address this gap by drawing on a nationally representative sample of adults in the United States – who either sympathised with or opposed anti-immigration activism – to identify individual attributes differentiating anti-immigration movement supporters and non-supporters. Perceptions of economic threat, waning confidence in political leadership, and prejudicial cultural beliefs about Latinos represent attributes differentiated movement supporters from non-supporters. Power devaluation theory is used as an overarching framework to meaningfully interpret these results. More generally, I argue that grievances play an important, yet under theorised role in jumpstarting conservative micromobilisation and that principles from power devaluation theory can help us understand the differentiation of movement support, irrespective of a social movement's political orientation.

Keywords: Anti-Immigration; Minutemen; Social Movement; Micromobilisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5153/sro.3141 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:socres:v:18:y:2013:i:4:p:195-212

DOI: 10.5153/sro.3141

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Sociological Research Online
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:sae:socres:v:18:y:2013:i:4:p:195-212