Understanding the difference in sustainable commitment to offline and online collective action: the longitudinal evidence from Chile’s social movements

• In Event: Understanding factors that foster citizen values in the Chilean Society: empirical contributions from The Chilean Longitudinal Social Survey (ELSOC)

Abstract

The present study was designed to examine whether activists’ initial engagement in street coordinated collective action could lead to their sustainable commitment to a cause via Internet-based activism over time. Based on recent advances in social movement literature, we hypothesized that activists’ initial involvement in offline activities would predict their engagement in digitally mediated collective action to the greater extent than the converse, allowing dissenting individuals to involve a society at large to their local struggle by using global social networks. We also sought to explore whether the predicted pattern of the cross-lagged association between offline and online collective action will be the same depending on the identity of a social movement. Using panel data from a large nationally representative sample in Chile (N = 2485), we found that people’s initial engagement in street collective action at Time 1 led to their actual participation in digitally enabled protest activities at Time 2, whereas the reverse causal order was found to be non-significant. We also found that this pattern of a cross-lagged association was similar for the country’s social movements featuring students’ (N = 401), labour (N = 320), and environmental (108) activists. Results revealed that there were no significant cross-lagged associations among activists supporting the country’s battle against juvenile delinquency (N = 420) and “pro-life/anti-abortion” demands (N =125). The latter group was found to sustain their cause over time through online collective action only.

Author

• Daniel Miranda, P. Universidad Católica de Chile