Social Image, Networks, and Protest Participation
59 Pages Posted: 24 May 2018 Last revised: 18 Jan 2023
Date Written: April 26, 2020
Abstract
Social motivation plays a vital role in electoral participation and other forms of civic engagement. We examine the role of social image concerns in the decision to participate in political protests. We develop a dynamic model of protest participation, where socially-minded individuals use protest participation to signal their type. We then test predictions of the model using individual and city-level data from 2011-2012 political protests in Russia. List experiment results from a specially conducted survey imply that social signaling motives indeed were important for the decision to participate in protests, which makes the theory applicable. We report several findings, consistent with the theory. First, protest participation declined over time. Second, participation in online protest groups increased offline protest participation. Finally, the importance of both online social networks and offline social capital evolves over time in a manner predicted by the theory.
Keywords: social image, political participation, protests, social media
JEL Classification: D72, C31
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation