Witnessing Political Protest on Civic Engagement and Political Attitudes: A Natural Experiment

• In Event: 242 - Regular Session. Media and Social Movements

Abstract

The paper examines the causal effect of witnessing political protests on future civic engagement and political attitudes, with a special focus on the impact of 12 political protests in Hong Kong from 2012-2013 on visitors from Mainland China. The problem is important in the age of globalization, since people from authoritarian state have much more opportunities to physically experience the democratic countries; previous research nevertheless barely consider the problem and did not make causal analysis. We leverage a natural experiment design. The burst of a protest offers an exogenous variation: visitors who happened to be in Hong Kong at the dates of protests, and who visited Hong Kong before/after the protests will be averagely similar except that the formal may see the protest, while the latter cannot. We use check-in history from multiple Social Networking Sites(SNS) to determine when and where users of SNS visited Hong Kong. We use over 20 million users’ posts in SNS and automatically analyze their political opinions. The result shows that witnesses of protests significantly speak more (25%) politics in SNS after the protest. Witnesses do not significantly change their support for democracy; they however showed less distrust of claims of protestors comparing with non-witnesses. The result reveals a spillover effect of protests on non-participants; it also reveals complex nature of democracy diffusion.

Authors

• Han Zhang, Princeton University

• Nicholas Jing Yuan, Microsoft Research Asia

• Xing Xie, Microsoft Research Asia