Why Men Don’t Rebel. Every-day Sentiment and Protest Behavior in the West Bank.

• In Event: Protests in difficult conditions

Abstract

Inspired by Gurr’s (1970) Why Men Rebel, much of the literature argues that people revolt in response to economic hardship or political oppression. However, while the probability of protest might be higher in these contexts, the majority of men and women suffering from these grievances are not engaging in political revolt. To investigate what motivates some to participate and others not to, this paper focuses on a particular environment that is well-known for its political grievances: the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The paper analyzes an original dataset of ethnographic interviews (in Arabic) with 32 Palestinians living in Bethlehem, Ramallah, Hebron and East Jerusalem. These respondents, who clearly demonstrate grievances in their interviews, did not participate in collective resistance at the time of the interview – and most never did. The paper first applies qualitative methods developed by Corbin and Strauss to code the interview transcripts for experiences of oppression and economic hardship, as well as individual responses related to these experiences. This analysis, elaborating on Dornschneider (2019), produces a typology of every-day grievances and reactions to these grievances, which exclude engagement in collective resistance.

The paper then applies quantitative text analysis to identify positive versus negative sentiment from the Arabic interview transcripts. The sentiment analysis (Taboada et al 2011; Grimmer & Stewart 2013) shows that individuals express negative sentiment when talking about their daily grievances, whereas they express more neutral sentiment when talking about other subjects. This finding is consistent with grievance models of protest that highlight the role of negative emotions, such as frustration (Davies 1974) or anger (Van Zomeren et al 2008; Jasper 2014). Furthermore, the combination of quantitative text analysis and qualitatively coded ethnographic interview data is in itself a methodological innovation.

However, the analysis moreover shows that individuals express positive sentiment when discussing how they respond to their grievances privately, avoiding engagement in collective resistance. This finding is consistent with Scott’s (2008) Weapons of the Weak, which unpacks everyday forms of peasant resistance and points to the importance of techniques of evasion. It furthermore suggests that bypassing collective resistance in a highly oppressive setting can give individuals a sense of hope or efficacy.

Establishing the link between macro-level patterns and individual-level behavior is a perennial problem in social science (Elster 2007). This finding establishes some boundary conditions of the grievances theory of protest, providing insight into the linkage between contextual circumstances and individual responses. It adds to existing psychological accounts that focus on perceived efficacy in explaining participation in collective action (Van Zomeren et al 2008) and resistance.



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Van Zomeren, M., Postmes, T., & Spears, R. (2008). Toward an Integrative Social Identity Model of Collective Action: A quantitative research synthesis of three socio-psychological perspectives. Psychological Bulletin, 134(4), 504.

Author

• Stephanie Dornschneider, University College Dublin