Participation in social movements during extreme weather events

• In Event: Civic Engagement

Abstract

Social movements can bolster collective well-being by catalyzing sweeping public policy change, but only when participation in them is widespread. As a result, understanding what motivates people to participate in social movements is critical to the policymaking process. In this study, we are interested in how local environmental risks could affect people's decision to participate in social movements, especially around environmental efforts. Our measure of local environmental risk is extreme weather events, specifically, very hot days, cold days, and days with heavy precipitation, since they are associated with serious health risks and are expected to worsen with climate change. Very hot days and days with heavy precipitation are defined as daily temperature and precipitation (respectively) exceeding the 90th percentile, while very cold days are days when daily temperature is below the 10th percentile. Percentile thresholds are relative to a given locale and determined by the period between 2000 and 2023. To measure participation in social movements, we use a unique dataset obtained from a nonprofit that tracks sign-ups for different forms of advocacy it organizes, with a particular focus on environmental causes (e.g., donating to a specific cause, signing up for town halls or a petition) between 2018 and 2023. Our main study period focuses on 2018 and 2019 to avoid the COVID-19 pandemic. These data allow us to track sign-ups at the daily level from the same individual over time and includes information on individuals' zip code of residence. As a result, we account for an extensive set of time-varying controls in our analysis, in addition to individual, month, and year fixed effects. Further, the timing and location of extreme weather events is plausibly exogenous to other factors that affect participation in social movements since it depends upon atmospheric conditions. This implies our results are less likely to suffer from bias. We find, on average, an additional very hot and cold day is associated with a 0.16 and 0.38 (respectively) increase in sign-ups for different forms of advocacy, which represents a 15% and 35% of the mean level of sign-ups. An additional day of heavy precipitation is associated with a 0.098 increase in sign-ups, representing a 9% increase in the mean level of social movement participation. These results suggest climate change-driven events could be an important mechanism for social participation. Results are robust to different specifications and samples.

Author

• Nicole S Ngo, University of Oregon
  Presenting Author