Uncertainty Framing of Environmental Disasters and the Willingness to Protest

• In Event: Experiments on Protest and Collective Action

Abstract

Major environmental disasters generate uncertainty, which becomes a crucial element of post-disaster political dynamics. Yet, aside from a few studies of uncertainty in environmental discourse and political behavior, political effects of uncertainty have not received much attention from scholars. The purpose of this project is to gain an understanding of the effects of uncertainty communication on public willingness to participate in non-violent protest such as peaceful demonstrations, petitions or boycotts. Specifically, we ask: Why does post-disaster uncertainty dampen public willingness to protest in some cases but encourages it in others?
We rely on the findings from a text analysis of news media coverage of three major industrial environmental disasters linked to varying degrees of post-disaster protest: the Mount Polley mine leak, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Drawing on the existing literature on framing and motivated reasoning, we propose new hypotheses related to the effects of uncertainty on people’s willingness to protest. We test these through a survey experiment of 3,600 adults in the United States.
Our preliminary results challenge the psychological literature on demobilizing effects of uncertainty. The effectiveness of the uncertainty framing is conditional on political ideology, with more liberal respondents being more likely to resist such framing and therefore more likely to participate in a protest activity. This finding reveals a new interaction effect between uncertainty and political ideology, one that warrants further investigations.

Authors

• Miriam Matejova, University of British Columbia

• Eric Merkley, University of British Columbia