A Penchant for Protest?

Much has been made of the Millennial generation’s seemingly low rates of political participation. Some argue that this generation is politically apathetic, while others suggest that Millennials have eschewed traditional politics in favor of protest as a means of political participation. Drawing on Canada’s 2013 General Social Survey (Cycle 27, Social Identity), I employ an exploratory latent class analysis to determine whether the Millennial generation can be usefully categorized according to their participation in various forms of political, civic, and social movement activities. I then use binary logit regression to determine how well the biographical availability hypothesis explains Millennial politics. This research reveals that Canadian Millennials may be grouped into four categories: the politically unengaged, the politically expressive, the civically engaged, and activist. Support for the biographical availability hypothesis is mixed. As expected, students are more likely to be activists and parenthood reduces the odds of being politically expressive or an activist, but home ownership does not decrease the chances of Millennials being politically engaged and increases the chances of being civically engaged. Younger Millennials (ages 15–24) are much more likely to be politically unengaged compared to older Millennials (ages 25–34).

Survivor: Spectators and Gladiators in the US Environmental Movement, 2000-2010

What motivates people to participate in which forms of environmental activism? To address this question, we revise empirical models examining environmental activism by disaggregating the outcome variable of movement participation and dichotomizing two key motivational factors. Using repeated cross-sectional data from the US General Social Survey of 2000 and 2010, this study conducts logistic regression of four forms of participation on perceived severity and sense of efficacy, while accounting for biographical availability and political engagement. Results from regression analysis show that vocabularies of motive have substantial impacts on an individual’s likelihood of: 1) signing a petition; 2) giving money; 3) joining a group; and 4) joining a protest or demonstration. Their effects are large enough to override the noticeable impacts of liberalism and education. This study also finds that the level of participation in the movement across all forms has decreased between 2000 and 2010. These findings direct our attention to the limited capacity of the public sphere to accommodate the environmental movement during the last decade, as well as to potential changes in environmental activism in the coming decades that may mobilize those previously less likely to participate.

Persistent Activist Communication in Occupy Gezi

We revisit the notion of activist persistence against the backdrop of protest communication on Twitter. We take an event-based approach and examine Occupy Gezi, a series of protests that occurred in Turkey in the early summer of 2013. By cross-referencing survey data with longitudinal Twitter data and in-depth interviews, we investigate the relationship between biographical availability, relational and organisational ties, and social and personal costs to persistent activism online and on location. Contrary to expectations, we find no clear-cut relationship between those factors and sustained commitment to participation in the occupation. We show that persistent activist communication did not feed into enduring organisational structures despite the continuous online activity observed during and beyond the peak of the Gezi occupation. The article concludes with reflections on the organisational ramifications of persistent communication and its significance in a political context posing high risks to participation in dissident politics.

Explaining Differential Protest Participation: Novices, Returners, Repeaters, and Stalwarts

Protest participation scholarship tends to focus on the special characteristics of novices and the highly committed, underplaying the significance of those in between. In this article, we fill a lacuna in the literature by refocusing attention on four different types of protesters: novices, returners, repeaters, and stalwarts. Employing data from protest surveys of demonstrations that took place in seven European countries (2009-2010), we test whether these types of protesters are differentiated by biographical-structural availability and/or psychological-attitudinal engagement. Our results suggest that biographical availability distinguishes our four groups, but not as a matter of degree. Few indicators of structural availability distinguish between the groups of protesters, and emotional factors do not distinguish between them at all. Some political engagement factors suggest similarity between novices and returners. This confirms the need to avoid treating protesters as a homogenous group and reinforces the importance of assessing the contributions of diverse factors to sustaining "protest politics."

A Two-Stage Model for a Two-Stage Process: How Biographical Availability Matters for Social Movement Mobilization

We model differential participation in protest as a two-stage mobilization process: willingness to engage in protest and conversion of willingness into participation. Treating mobilization as a two-stage process resolves an important puzzle in the literature on differential participation: the lack of constraining effects for biographical unavailability. Using a nationally representative sample of individuals in the United States, we find that while our measures of biographical unavailability have no effect on the second stage of the mobilization process (converting willingness to protest to actual behavior), they show robust negative effects on the first stage of the mobilization process, removing people from the pool of willing protest participants. We also find that gender moderates the relationship between some of our measures of biographical unavailability-particularly marital status-and protest willingness.

Rethinking Recruitment to High-Risk/Cost Activism: The Case of Nicaragua Exchange

We report the findings of our research on differing levels of movement involvement by focusing on participation in a high-risk/cost campaign mobilized by Nicaragua Exchange, a solidarity organization in the U.S.-Central America peace movement of the 1980s. Our data confirm the importance of relational ties in high-risk activism, yet raise questions about the relevance of biographical availability and the unique functions of organizational ties. We argue that McAdam's model is an important advance in our understanding of the factors that facilitate high-risk/cost activism, yet its micro-structural approach does not sufficiently account for human agency and individual abilities to negotiate and overcome barriers to activism.