Barriers to Protest Participation

• In Event: 20861 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3: Drivers and Barriers to Movement Participation

Abstract

Research in social movements has often investigated the factors associated with
protest participation, yet few studies focus on how non-protestors make sense of the
barriers to their participation. In this article, we draw on open-ended survey
responses from 378 college students who did not participate in on-campus budget-cut
protests. We identify narratives individuals use to justify their non-participation,
provide exemplars of these narratives, and employ randomization inference models to
explain individuals’ likelihood of selecting particular narratives. Overall, we find that
socioeconomic and ideological factors influence individuals’ narratives of
non-participation. Specifically, socially-liberal individuals were less likely to couch
their non-participation in terms of perceptions of protests as ineffective, useless, or
controversial, whereas economically-liberal individuals justify their non-participation
as the result of protests being ineffective. We argue that ideological factors act as
barriers to participation by (negatively) shaping perceptions of protest.

Author

• Burrel James Vann, San Diego State University