Barriers to Participation

• In Event: Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5: The Power of Student and Youth Movements

Abstract

Research in social movements has 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, I draw on open-ended survey responses from 378 college students who did not participate in on-campus protests, and identify predictors of narratives individuals use to justify their non-participation. Employing novel randomization inference techniques, I find that socioeconomic and ideological factors influence individuals’ narratives about why they did not participate in protest activity. Specifically, socially-liberal individuals were less likely to couch their non-participation in terms of perceptions of protests as ineffective, useless, or controversial. I argue that ideological factors act as barriers to participation by (negatively) shaping perceptions of protest.

Author

• Burrel James Vann, San Diego State University