Repression on the Streets Gets Protesters on Their Feet

• In Event: Experiments on Protest and Collective Action

Abstract

On October 22, 2016 hundreds of people prepared to march toward the Dakota Access pipeline construction site near Standing Rock, North Dakota. As the marchers began their journey the eight miles to the construction site, they were met by police forces using pepper spray and batons. There were dozens of officers, backed by military trucks, machine guns, and nonlethal weapons approaching the protesters without warning (Hafiz, 2016). As the protesters attempted to leave, they were beaten and detained. There were mass arrests and serious injuries. During the Standing Rock protests the police also used water cannons, teargas grenades, and Tasers (Wong & Levin, 2016). When told they must evacuate and leave the premises, Kareen Lewis, a member of the Little River Band of Ottawa tribe said “I don’t want to leave. I want to stay here and see what’s going to happen”. At the same time, despite the orders to evacuate, more people continued to arrive every day, including a group of 2,000 veterans who said “they plan to act as human shields between protesters and the police” (Ouellet, 2016). Army veteran Wesley Clark Jr. organized a crowdsourcing campaign to call for fellow veterans to assemble as a peaceful, unarmed militia to defend the water protectors from assault and intimidation at the hands of the militarized police force stating “Everyday becomes more evident that the defenders of America must stand with the Water Protectors. Let’s stop this savage injustice being committed right here at home.”(Chow, 2016). Despite the numerous arrests and various methods of police violence used against the protesters, individuals decided to continue joining the demonstration. After experiencing so much violence during a peaceful protest, why did individuals continue to join and risk encountering even greater repression?
In liberal democracies individuals are bestowed with the right to protest when they feel their voices need to be heard. Even when protests are considered highly costly to an individual, the benefits may outweigh the costs if the protest succeeds and is able to provide more immediate results than waiting to go to the voting booth. Understanding why an individual would ignore the costs of participating in a protest is ultimately important to the greater study of protests, in that it explains what factors are likely to produce protests and potentially create political instability.
This project seeks to contribute to the study of protest motivations by examining why an individual would join a protest after the government takes action against the protest. Specifically, this study develops an experiment to understand why an individual would join a peaceful or violent protest once the government has used repressive means to put down the protest. Understanding why an individual would join a protest even when faced with potential government violence answers more than the basic question of why an individual would attend a protest. This study sheds new light onto why some people will endure even greater costs to fight for something when they could simply stay home and free ride. I will also examine whether there are differences in motivation when it comes to joining a peaceful protest faced with repression versus a violent protest that experiences governmental repression. When an individual is faced with the choice to attend a protest where police are likely to use (or are currently using) violent crowd dispersal techniques, why would that individual join the protest and suffer the potential consequences?
Using a survey experiment, I seek to understand the mechanisms through which protest activity is conditioned by the government’s response to such actions. In this experiment, I will test emotional responses such as feelings of injustice and anger on an individual’s likelihood of attending a protest. Greater feelings of anger or injustice towards how the government handles the original protest will, in turn, influence how individuals respond to these actions taken by the government. Utilizing an experiment to trigger a respondent to develop feelings about a situation in which a group of protesters (either peaceful or violent) is either repressed, accommodated, or ignored by the democratic government allows us to observe the mechanisms that contribute to an individual’s decision to take part in the protest, even if it could be dangerous.

Author

• Patience Kapfer, University at Buffalo