Emotional Protester Perspective: Protest out of Anger or Stay Home in Fear?

• In Event: Political Psychology in the Wake of Violence

Abstract

How do state tactics used in response to protests affect protest continuation at the micro level? Particularly, does repression increase or decrease the likelihood that individual protesters decide to continue to participate in a protest movement once the protest is already underway? I argue that ignoring protesters and soft repression (crowd dispersal tactics and arrests) in the first round of a protest movement anger individual protesters and provoke them to continue to protest in the subsequent stage of the event. Hard repression (beating, killing, and shooting protesters), however, lead to fear and deter participation in the second round. Both partial and full accommodation produce joy, but joy is a mediator only for partial accommodation and affects the decision to continue to protest positively. Full accommodation reduces protest behavior because it terminates reasons to protest. That is, the causal relationship between state repression and protest is mediated by emotions. I thus propose collecting data from an online survey experiment in the US and Argentina and conducting a mediation and sensitivity analysis.

Author

• Deren Onursal, University of California Riverside