Under What Conditions are Students Willing to Protest? Selective Incentives, Production Functions, and Grievances
This article tests a theory of student protest based on collective action theories. Drawing on rational choice theories of selective incentives, critical mass theories of production functions, and social psychological theories of protest, the present article specifies a theory of willingness to protest. To test our model, we administer a factorial survey experiment of student protest to a random sample of undergraduate students. We find that both the perceived likelihood of a protest’s success and one’s intention to protest are affected by the magnitude of the grievance, selective rewards and punishments, and the number of participants. The latter effect suggests a decelerating production function. Finally, we find that the likelihood of success mediates much of the effect of social context on intention to protest, implying that actors consider the effects of incentives not only on their own behavior but also on the behavior of others.