A 14 year trend in intended illegal protest activities - evidence from the International Civic And Citizenship Education Study

• In Event: Activism and Social Change

Proposal

Background

“[P]rotests are usually collective expressions of objection to particular actions or situations” (Branton et al., 2015, p. 390). The motivation to participate in political protests is assumed to be related to the wish their voices to be heard and influence the public opinion and invoke actions from the governments. Protests are indicator for democracy where citizens are entitled to participate in peaceful protests that represent the collective basic level action for achieving social change for the disadvantaged ones. On the other hand, illegal protests are an effective form of civil disobedience (Kuang & Kennedy, 2018). Previous studies (e.g. Ainley & Schulz, 2011) have found that the expected participation in legal protests is related to multiple factors like civic knowledge citizenship self-efficacy, community participation experiences, interest in social and political issues, and internal political efficacy. Self-efficacy is also related positively to expected participation in illegal protests. On the other hand expected illegal protests are also related negatively to the trust in governmental institutions (Ainley & Schulz, 2011). In addition, negative civic participation (including illegal protests in future) is related to negative traditional values, previous participation experiences, civic values, poor attitudes to democratic values, as well as to issues of social equality (Kuang and Kennedy, 2018).
There is a visible trend in increasing the number of protest all over the world. Ortiz et al. (2022) tracks the trends in protest on a world scale between 2006 and 2020. They find that in Europe and Central Asia, for example the number of protests increased from 119 in 3006-2010 to 368 in 2016-2020, i.e. more than three times. It is similar in North America, 44 vs. 126 protest. The protests prevailed greatly in the middle-income and high-income countries. The global and international protests also show rising numbers with total of 239 protest between 2006 and 2020. The largest number of protests (1,503) were due to the failure of the political representation and political systems, followed by economic justice and anti-austerity protests (1,484), civil rights protests (1,360), and global justice protests (897). Many of the protests take action that is beyond the legal allowance. In many cases the protests turned into crowd violence. About 20% of the protests between 2006 and 2020 ended in vandalism, looting and violence. Some examples of such protests, among many other, are the radical right protests for return of monarchy and against LGBT in Brazil; protests against COVID-19 lockdowns and lack of jobs in Chile and Senegal; the “yellow vests” in France and Ireland (Ortiz et al., 2022).

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to track the 14 year trends in expected participation in illegal protests using the data from three cycles of the International Civic And Citizenship Education Study (i.e. 2009, 2016 and 2022) conducted by the IEA. ICCS is a cross-sectional study providing trend items on various civic and citizenship topics in education, including expectations for participation in illegal protest activities.

Methods

The study will use data from the 2009, 2016 and 2022 cycles of ICCS. Data from 12 countries (Bulgaria, Chinese Taipei, Colombia, Denmark, Estonia, Italy, Latvia, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia and Sweden) participating in all three ICCS cycles will be used. The main variable of interest is the “Students’ expected participation in future illegal activities” scale which was constructed from three questionnaire items (spray-paint slogans on walls, stage protests by blocking traffic, and occupy public buildings as sign of protest) (Schulz & Friedman, 2018). Besides the estimates on expected participation in illegal protests, the trends in civic and citizenship achievement scores will be tracked as well, as previous studies (e.g. Schulz et al., 2018) have shown that civic knowledge is one of the major factors related to the intents for future participation in illegal protests. The average population estimates of the students’ expected future participation in illegal protests scale will be compared, along with the average student achievement for all three ICCS cycles. This way, the changes in the trends in expected illegal participation will be track along with the civic knowledge and be at least partially explained by it.

Expected results

The results from ICCS 2009 and 2016 already show increase in expected participation in illegal protests (Bulgaria, Chinese Taipei, Italy, Malta, Norway and Slovenia), slight decrease in others (Denmark, Estonia, and Sweden), or substantial decrease (Latvia and the Netherlands). The ICCS 2022 database is under preparation and is scheduled for release in February 2024. It can be hypothesized that the ICCS 2022 results will show an increase in the expected illegal protest activities of eight graders, following the increasing rates of illegal protest, a trend that is observed at least in Europe in the last few years. It is enough to mention the current riots in France which took a form of massive violence and destruction. The analysis of the ICCS 2022 data will be conduceted just before the CIES 2024 conference.

References

Ainley, J., and Schulz, W. (2011). “Expected Participation in Protest Activities among Lower
Secondary Students in 38 Countries”. Paper presented at the annual meetings of the
AERA in New Orleans, April 8-12. Accessed 30
December 2016. http://iccs.acer.edu.au/uploads/File/AERA2011/AERA_ICCS_
ProtestActivities (NewOrleans2011).pdf.

Branton, R., V. Martinez-Ebers, T. E. Carey, and Matsubayashi, T. (2015). Social Protest and
Policy Attitudes: The Case of the 2006 Immigrant Rallies. American Journal of Political
Science 59 (2): 390–402.

Kuang, X., Kennedy, K. (2018). Hong Kong adolescents’ future civic engagement: do protest activities count? A Journal of Comparative and International Education 50(3), , 428-446.
Ortiz, I., Burke, S., Berrada, M. and Cortes, H. S. (2022). World protests: A study of key Protest Issues in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan.

Schulz, W., Ainley, J., Fraillon, J., Losito, B., Agrusti, G., & Friedman, T. (2018). Becoming citizens in a changing world: IEA international civic and citizenship education study 2016 international report. IEA.

Schulz, W., & Friedman, T. (2018). Scaling Procedures for ICCS Questionnaire Items. In W. Schulz, B. Losito, R. Carstens, & J. Fraillon (Eds.), ICCS 2016 Technical Report (pp. 139–244). IEA.

Author

• Plamen Vladkov Mirazchiyski, Educational Research Institute (Pedagoški inštitut) 68705093