Depressive Symptoms and Protest Participation

• In Event: Poster Session: Civic Engagement

Abstract

The mental health of the American public has been a growing concern for decades, with the Covid-19 pandemic bringing depressive symptoms into especially sharp relief (Ettman et al. 2022). Yet, despite ample theoretical reason to expect strong associations between mental well-being and a range of important forms of political behavior, political scientists have only rarely incorporated it into their theories and models. Because motivation and interest tend to be more central causes of participation than perceived material incentives (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995), anything that causes motivation and interest to wane has the potential to have negative effects. Depression is an especially likely culprit. It is associated with impaired self-worth, a reduced sense of control over important outcomes, and in turn, a diminished sense of personal efficacy (See Abramson, Metalsky, and Alloy 1989. Such impaired personal efficacy ought to bleed over into the political domain curtailing political interest and external political efficacy. By undermining the sense that political institutions are responsive to citizens, (Bernardi et al. 2021; Landwehr and Ojeda 2021), depression ought to drain the very resources that allow citizens to overcome the costs associated with political participation.
My specific focus is protest. If depression does affect protest behavior as I expect, the relationship is normatively important. Depression disproportionately afflicts disadvantaged groups such as women, ethnic minorities, and those with limited resources (Nolen-Hoeksema et al. 1999; Ridley et al. 2020; Williams et al. 2007). These groups are exactly the groups for which protest might be most valuable to help them redress persistent inequalities. To the extent that poor mental health provides a barrier, it silently undermines the capacity of these groups to use protest to challenge a disadvantageous political status quo (Klandermans 1997; Smith and Ortiz 2002; Van Zomeren, Postmes, and Spears 2008). Because protest behavior is costly, motivation, interest, and efficacy ought to be especially important to get would be participants off the proverbial couch and into the streets.
My theory draws on the Social Identity Model of Collective Action (SIMCA) (Van Zomeren, Postmes, and Spears 2008) and relevant work in psychopathology to suggest that depressive symptoms should generally limit protest participation. That being said, I expect the relationship between protest behavior and mental well-being is likely more complicated than it might seem at first blush and different from what others have shown. Work on voter turnout and depressive symptoms theorizes a negative linear relationship―increasing depressive symptoms decrease the likelihood of voting (Bernardi et al. 2021; Landwehr and Ojeda 2021; Ojeda 2015). Although I agree that those with the most depression symptoms will protest least, it is important to account for expectations concerning those across the entire range of depressive symptoms scales, not just those at the high end. Consider the low end of a depressive symptoms scale. Whereas protesting requires a level of grievance sufficient to underwrite its substantial costs (Simon and Klandermans 2001; Van Stekelenburg and Klandermans 2013), those who score low in depressive symptom―people who express no challenges to their mental well-being―seem unlikely candidates to be experiencing enough grievance to encourage protest participation. The psychological state of those scoring high in depression symptoms ought to inhibit their ability to act regardless of whether they are experiencing political grievance. Taken together, then, I expect that those most likely to protest are those who express a moderate amount of mental distress, with those expressing none or very high levels lagging behind.
To test my hypotheses, I first draw the European Social Survey (ESS), which others have used to test the link between depression and voter turnout (Bernardi et al. 2021; Landwehr and Ojeda 2021). Because protest is rare across countries, however, it is of little value to analyze all countries in the collection. After all, depression, not to mention all other factors, will make little substantive difference in a behavior that almost never occurs. Hence, I focus my analysis on Spain, a country that saw widespread protests in all three survey rounds that include measures of depressive symptoms. Here, I find strong evidence of the hypothesized curvilinear relationship. Finally, I replicate the shape of this relationship using a survey of African Americans conducted during the fall of 2020, not long after a wave of protests motivated by the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd (Reny and Newman 2021). These findings highlight the importance of considering depressive symptoms and mental health as factors that impact political behavior broadly, while also suggesting that the shape of depressive symptoms’ effect may vary depending on the political behavior in question.

Author

• Juan Carlos Rueda-Canon, UNC-Chapel-Hill