Protests as strategic games: experimental evidence from Hong Kong's antiauthoritarian movement

Davide Cantoni, David Y Yang, Noam Yuchtman and Y. Jane Zhang

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Social scientists have long viewed the decision to protest as strategic, with an individual’s participation a function of their beliefs about others’ turnout. We conduct a framed field experiment that recalibrates individuals’ beliefs about others’ protest participation, in the context of Hong Kong’s ongoing antiauthoritarian movement. We elicit subjects’ planned participation in an upcoming protest and their prior beliefs about others’ participation, in an incentivized manner. One day before the protest, we randomly provide a subset of subjects with truthful information about others’ protest plans and elicit posterior beliefs about protest turnout, again in an incentivized manner. After the protest, we elicit subjects’ actual participation. This allows us to identify the causal effects of positively and negatively updated beliefs about others’ protest participation on subjects’ own turnout. In contrast with the assumptions of many recent models of protest participation, we consistently find evidence of strategic substitutability. We provide guidance regarding plausible sources of strategic substitutability that can be incorporated into theoretical models of protests.

JEL-codes: D74 D80 P00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 57 pages
Date: 2019-05-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Published in Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1, May, 2019, 134(2), pp. 1021 - 1077. ISSN: 0033-5533

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/124819/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Protests as Strategic Games: Experimental Evidence from Hong Kong's Antiauthoritarian Movement (2019)
Working Paper: PROTESTS AS STRATEGIC GAMES: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FROM HONG KONG'S ANTIAUTHORITARIAN MOVEMENT (2019)
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:ehl:lserod:124819

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().