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Moral Logics of Support for Nonviolent Resistance: Evidence From a Cross-National Survey Experiment
Abstract
An emerging consensus holds that nonviolent resistance campaigns are more successful than violent campaigns, partly because they attract more participants. Yet, we lack an understanding of whether and why nonviolent tactics attracts support. We propose two motivational logics that can explain support for nonviolence: An instrumentalist logic, whereby nonviolent resistance is preferred based on cost-benefit considerations, and an intrinsic logic where nonviolent resistance is preferred because of perceived inherent moral worth. To investigate the motivational pull of these two logics, we conduct a pre-registered survey experiment among more than 5000 respondents across 33 countries in fall 2019. We find that nonviolent tactics strongly increase movement support relative to violent tactics, and that the preference for nonviolence is primarily driven by intrinsic commitments to the moral worth of nonviolent resistance, rather than instrumental considerations.
Over the past two decades, there has been growing scholarly interest in nonviolent resistance—a method of conflict in which unarmed people mobilize collective protests, strikes, and boycotts in a coordinated way. Mass movements that rely overwhelmingly on nonviolent resistance sometimes feature unarmed collective violence, fringe violence, or even organized armed action. What do we know about the effects of violent flanks on movement outcomes? This article reviews findings on the relationships between nonviolent and unarmed resistance, violence, and the outcomes of mass mobilization, as well as the directionality of these relationships. The balance of empirical evidence suggests that organized armed violence appears to reduce the chances for otherwise nonviolent movements to succeed, whereas unarmed collective violence has more ambiguous effects. The field will benefit from greater analytical precision in comparing the units of analysis, scope, intensity, and media framing of violent flank activity.
Policy debates on strategies to end extremist violence frequently cite poverty as a root cause of support for the perpetrating groups. There is little evidence to support this contention, particularly in the Pakistani case. Pakistan's urban poor are more exposed to the negative externalities of militant violence and may in fact be less supportive of the groups. To test these hypotheses we conducted a 6,000-person, nationally representative survey of Pakistanis that measured affect toward four militant organizations. By applying a novel measurement strategy, we mitigate the item nonresponse and social desirability biases that plagued previous studies due to the sensitive nature of militancy. Contrary to expectations, poor Pakistanis dislike militants more than middle-class citizens. This dislike is strongest among the urban poor, particularly those in violent districts, suggesting that exposure to terrorist attacks reduces support for militants. Long-standing arguments tying support for violent organizations to income may require substantial revision.
The color revolutions in Eastern Europe and the recent waves of protests in the Middle East and North Africa show that nonviolent conflicts, like violent conflicts, spread across countries. Scholars argue that the idea of adopting nonviolent resistance travels across borders because dissidents learn from foreign protestors about the principles of nonviolent campaigns and their success in changing the status quo. However, the commonly used country-level data do not allow scholars to distinguish between these two learning mechanisms and to establish a causal association between exposure to information about nonviolent resistance and changing individuals’ attitudes. Therefore, we conduct an experimental survey to analyze and distinguish individuals’ responses to information about the principles of nonviolent campaigns and their higher prospects for success. Our findings show both types of information increase individuals’ evaluation of nonviolent resistance. However, exposure to information on the principles of nonviolent campaigns yields different results than exposure to information on the success rate of nonviolent campaigns.
How do stigmatized minorities advance agendas when confronted with hostile majorities? Elite theories of influence posit marginal groups exert little power. I propose the concept of agenda seeding to describe how activists use methods like disruption to capture the attention of media and overcome political asymmetries. Further, I hypothesize protest tactics influence how news organizations frame demands. Evaluating black-led protests between 1960 and 1972, I find nonviolent activism, particularly when met with state or vigilante repression, drove media coverage, framing, congressional speech, and public opinion on civil rights. Counties proximate to nonviolent protests saw presidential Democratic vote share increase 1.6–2.5%. Protester-initiated violence, by contrast, helped move news agendas, frames, elite discourse, and public concern toward “social control.” In 1968, using rainfall as an instrument, I find violent protests likely caused a 1.5–7.9% shift among whites toward Republicans and tipped the election. Elites may dominate political communication but hold no monopoly.
Rebel groups employ a number of strategies beyond violence, and these alternative tactics are often thought to improve the reputation and legitimacy of rebel actors. How powerful states (and their publics) view rebels can affect their chances of international recognition, inclusion in peace talks, and whether they are eventually successful at achieving their objectives. This study employs two experiments to test the link between rebel tactics and opinions of these rebels held by external audiences. We examine the impact of six rebel behaviors on American public opinion: (a) nonviolent demonstrations, (b) nonviolent interventions (such as blockades and sit ins), (c) social noncooperation (such as hunger strikes), (d) terrorism, (e) stone throwing, and (f) the use of local democratic practice (elections) in rebel groups. We find that the use of elections within rebel actors, demonstrations, and hunger strikes improve positive perceptions of rebels, whereas rebel use of terrorism decreases support.
What are the political and economic consequences of contention (i.e., genocide, civil war, state repression/human rights violation, terrorism, and protest)? Despite a significant amount of interest as well as quantitative research, the literature on this subject remains underdeveloped and imbalanced across topic areas. To date, investigations have been focused on particular forms of contention and specific consequences. While this research has led to some important insights, substantial limitations—as well as opportunities for future development—remain. In particular, there is a need for simultaneously investigating a wider range of consequences (beyond democracy and economic development), a wider range of contentious activity (beyond civil war, protest, and terrorism), a wider range of units of analysis (beyond the nation year), and a wider range of empirical approaches in order to handle particular difficulties confronting this type of inquiry (beyond ordinary least-squares regression). Only then will we have a better and more comprehensive understanding of what contention does and does not do politically and economically. This review takes stock of existing research and lays out an approach for looking at the problem using a more comprehensive perspective.
How do international audiences evaluate the legitimacy of secessionist insurgencies? Although secessionists often propagate their behavioral choices, such as state-building and non-violence, to international audiences in the hopes of generating support, scholars know little about the effects of this information. In this article, we use survey experiments in the United States and the United Kingdom to examine how international audiences respond to two commonly used strategies of secession: civilian killings and social service provision. We find that international audiences view secessionists who avoid civilian killings and provide social services as more legitimate than secessionists who kill civilians and do not provide services, respectively. Further, we show that service provision can allow secessionists to reduce—and, in some cases, eliminate—the public costs of civilian killings. These findings have important implications for ongoing secessionist conflicts across the globe.
How do people respond to violent political protest? The authors present a theory proposing that the use of violence leads the general public to view a protest group as less reasonable, a perception that reduces identification with the group. This reduced identification in turn reduces public support for the violent group. Furthermore, the authors argue that violence also leads to more support for groups that are perceived as opposing the violent group. The authors test this theory using a large (n = 800) Internet-based survey experiment with a politically diverse sample. Participants responded to an experimental scenario based on recent violent confrontations between white nationalist protesters and antiracist counter-protesters, allowing the authors to study whether violent protest would reduce public support even when used against a widely reviled group. The authors found that the use of violence by an antiracist group against white nationalists led to decreased support for the antiracist group and increased support for the white nationalist group. Furthermore, the results were consistent with the theorized causal process: violence led to perceptions of unreasonableness, which reduced identification with and support for the protest group. Importantly, the results revealed a striking asymmetry: although acts of violence eroded support for an antiracist group, support for white nationalist groups was not reduced by the use of violence, perhaps because the public already perceives these groups as very unreasonable and identifies with them at low levels. Consistent with this interpretation, the authors found that self-identified Republicans, a subset of the sample that reported less extremely negative views of white nationalists, showed reduced support for white nationalists when they engaged in violence.
The literature on civil resistance finds that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to succeed than violent insurgencies. A parallel literature on democratization poses mass mobilization as exogenous to political liberalization. Contributing to both literatures, we propose the category of unarmed collective violence to capture an empirically recurring form of unruly collective action used by civilians and then use a mixed methods research design to examine its impact on democratization. An event history analysis finds that riots are positively associated with political liberalization in 103 nondemocracies from 1990 to 2004. Attacks by civilians on police stations during the January 25 Egyptian Revolution illustrate one way in which unarmed collective violence can bring about a democratic breakthrough. A qualitative examination of all 80 democratic transitions held between 1980 and 2010 also reveals the salience of unarmed collective violence by civilian forces. These findings contribute to research on the dynamics of contentious democratization and suggest that remaining unarmed may be more consequential for a democracy campaign than adhering to nonviolence.
The number of online experiments conducted with subjects recruited via online platforms has grown considerably in the recent past. While one commercial crowdworking platform - Amazon's Mechanical Turk - basically has established and since dominated this field, new alternatives offer services explicitly targeted at researchers. In this article, we present www.prolific.ac and lay out its suitability for recruiting subjects for social and economic science experiments. After briefly discussing key advantages and challenges of online experiments relative to lab experiments, we trace the platform's historical development, present its features, and contrast them with requirements for different types of social and economic experiments.
The success of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) as an online research platform has come at a price: MTurk has suffered from slowing rates of population replenishment, and growing participant non-naivety. Recently, a number of alternative platforms have emerged, offering capabilities similar to MTurk but providing access to new and more naïve populations. After surveying several options, we empirically examined two such platforms, CrowdFlower (CF) and Prolific Academic (ProA). In two studies, we found that participants on both platforms were more naïve and less dishonest compared to MTurk participants. Across the three platforms, CF provided the best response rate, but CF participants failed more attention-check questions and did not reproduce known effects replicated on ProA and MTurk. Moreover, ProA participants produced data quality that was higher than CF's and comparable to MTurk's. ProA and CF participants were also much more diverse than participants from MTurk.
Research suggests that nonviolent resistance (NVR) campaigns are more successful in deposing dictators than armed rebellions. However, ousting dictators is only the first step in the process of democratization. After deposing an autocratic regime, societies enter a transition phase where they must learn to consolidate the gains of democracy and bargain about the new rules of the democratic regime. But even if free, fair, and competitive elections are held, indicating a successful transition to democratic rule, uncertainty about its stability remains salient. In the period that follows, either democracy survives and proves to be resilient, or an autocratic backslide occurs. In this article, we analyze the effect of NVR campaigns on the survival of democratic regimes. Building on the literature on modes of transitions and nonviolent resistance, we argue that those democratic regimes that come into being as a result of a NVR campaign are less prone to democratic breakdown. The main mechanism which produces this effect is that the organizational culture of NVR campaigns spills over to the subsequent democratic regime fostering conditions favorable for democratic survival. We test the effect of NVR campaigns on democratic regime survival using survival analysis and propensity score matching. The results show that democratic regimes that experience NVR during the transition phase survive substantially longer than regimes without NVR.
Why do ordinary people take extraordinary risks and join an ethnic armed rebellion? This article tests a series of well-established hypotheses about selfish and identity based motivations and a new hypothesis based on prospect theory. It then employs a unique multi-method research strategy combining one of the most comprehensive datasets on insurgent recruitment that contains biographical information about 8,266 Kurdish militants with extensive fieldwork involving in-depth interviews with relatives of the militants to test these hypotheses. The findings show the decision to rebel is as much political as economic and social. While security concerns and expectations of benefits affect in the decision to rebel, social commitments, identities radicalized by state repression, and collective threat perceptions among efficacious individuals generated by political mobilization, rather than preexisting ethnic cleavages, also lead to participation in an ethnic insurgency. The latter findings explain the durability of insurgencies with limited economic resources and their ability to attract educated fighters.
We show that drought-induced changes in the intensity of riots lead to moves toward democracy in sub-Saharan Africa and that these changes are often a result of concessions made as a result of the riots. This provides evidence that low-intensity conflict can have a substantial short-run impact on democratic change and supports the “window of opportunity” hypothesis: droughts lead to an increase in the threat of conflict, and incumbents often respond by making democratic concessions.
The widespread opposition to unprecedented austerity measures in Greece provides a unique opportunity to study the causes of mass protest. This article reports the results of a survey of the adult population in which two-thirds of the respondents supported protest and 29 per cent reported actual involvement in strikes and/or demonstrations during 2010. Relative deprivation is a significant predictor of potential protest, but does not play any role in terms of who takes part in strikes or demonstrations. Previous protest participation emerges as a key predictor of actual protest. This study seeks to place these results within a comparative context, contrasting Greece with other countries facing similar challenges, and discusses the implications for the future of austerity politics.
Significance
Little evidence exists on whether preferences about hypothetical choices measured in a survey experiment are driven by the same structural determinants of the actual choices made in the real world. This study answers this question using a natural experiment as a behavioral benchmark. Comparing the results from conjoint and vignette experiments on which attributes of hypothetical immigrants generate support for naturalization with the outcomes of closely corresponding referendums in Switzerland, we find that the effects estimated from the surveys match the effects of the same attributes in the behavioral benchmark remarkably well. We also find that seemingly subtle differences in survey designs can produce significant differences in performance. Overall, the paired conjoint design performs the best.
Identifying causal mechanisms is a fundamental goal of social science. Researchers seek to study not only whether one variable affects another but also how such a causal relationship arises. Yet commonly used statistical methods for identifying causal mechanisms rely upon untestable assumptions and are often inappropriate even under those assumptions. Randomizing treatment and intermediate variables is also insufficient. Despite these difficulties, the study of causal mechanisms is too important to abandon. We make three contributions to improve research on causal mechanisms. First, we present a minimum set of assumptions required under standard designs of experimental and observational studies and develop a general algorithm for estimating causal mediation effects. Second, we provide a method for assessing the sensitivity of conclusions to potential violations of a key assumption. Third, we offer alternative research designs for identifying causal mechanisms under weaker assumptions. The proposed approach is illustrated using media framing experiments and incumbency advantage studies.
Political protest is seemingly a ubiquitous aspect of politics in advanced industrial societies, and its use may be spreading to less developed nations as well. Our research tests several rival theories of protest activity for citizens across an exceptionally wide range of polities. With data from the 1999–2002 wave of the World Values Survey, we demonstrate that the macro-level context – levels of economic and political development – significantly influences the amount of popular protest. Furthermore, a multi-level model examines how national context interacts with the micro-level predictors of protest activity. The findings indicate that contemporary protest is expanding not because of increasing dissatisfaction with government, but because economic and political development provide the resources for those who have political demands.
Collective action will be effective in achieving broader social change goals to the extent that it influences public opinion yet the degree to which collective action "works" in changing opinion is rarely studied. Experiment 1 (n = 158) showed that, consistent with a logic of strategic non-violence, non-violent collective action more effectively conveys a sense of the illegitimacy of the issue and the efficacy of the group, thereby promoting support for future non-violent actions. Experiment 2 (n = 139) explored the moderating role of allegations of corruption. A social context of corruption effectively undermined the efficacy and legitimacy of non-violent collective action, relative to support for violence, thereby promoting (indirectly) support for future extreme action. The implications of this research, for the logic of strategic non-violence and mobilizing supportive public opinion, are discussed.
The historical record indicates that nonviolent campaigns have been more successful than armed campaigns in achieving ultimate goals in political struggles, even when used against similar opponents and in the face of repression. Nonviolent campaigns are more likely to win legitimacy, attract widespread domestic and international support, neutralize the opponent's security forces, and compel loyalty shifts among erstwhile opponent supporters than are armed campaigns, which enjoin the active support of a relatively small number of people, offer the opponent a justification for violent counterattacks, and are less likely to prompt loyalty shifts and defections. An original, aggregate data set of all known major nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006 is used to test these claims. These dynamics are further explored in case studies of resistance campaigns in Southeast Asia that have featured periods of both violent and nonviolent resistance.
Using American Citizen Participation Survey data (Verba et al 1995a), we perform logistic regression analyses to adjudicate
between three core explanations for individual protest: biographical availability, political engagement and structural availability.
We calculate estimated probabilities to weigh the relative effects of these factors on the likelihood of protest participation,
and we find that being asked to protest is the strongest predictor of participating in protest, but that numerous other individual
characteristics such as political interest and organizational ties are important predictors of being asked to protest. Viewing
protest as a multi-stage process and recognizing that certain factors predict being asked to protest while others predict
actually protesting, we gain theoretical leverage over the ways in which individuals are prompted to take part in protest.
The article examines the relationship between women in society and the use of force by the state in the
international arena. The arguments build on a conception of power relationships found in gender
studies and feminist theories, and focus on how the internal distribution of political power at a societal
level (as opposed to a state level) will influence the willingness of the ruling elite to engage in militarized
interstate disputes and war. That is, the article explores the extent to which fertility rates directly
and indirectly – through women’s employment and political office – are associated with the use of force
by a state. The authors draw on public opinion literature, which shows that women’s attitudes toward
the use of force differ from those of men, to argue that the more women have access to the political
process the more constrained will be the state in its use of force. The results of the analysis demonstrate
that at the dyadic level, contiguous pairs of countries with low birthrates are less likely to go to war,
while, more generally, the lower the birthrates the less likely is a country to become engaged in the
more violent of militarized disputes. Our results suggest that policies to promote family planning might
be one effective form of managing the amount of interstate violence.
The study aims to extend the existing knowledge about the dynamics of first-time participation in protest events. To tackle
that puzzle we rely on extensive and innovative protest survey evidence covering 18 separate demonstrations in eight countries
across nine different issues. On the individual level, age, motivation, and non-organizational mobilization appear to be consistent
and robust predictors of first-timership. On the aggregate level, demonstrations staged just after or during a protest wave,
large demonstrations, and demonstrations of old or new emotional movements are attended by a relatively larger share of first-timers.
We conclude that it is thus the interplay of individual- and aggregate-level determinants that produces first-time participation.
Social movements often face tactic diversification. In otherwise nonviolent movements, some groups or radical flanks may resort to violent actions such as street rioting. This article analyzes the impact that these violent episodes can have on popular support for the movement as a whole. To estimate the causal effect of violence, it exploits an unexpected riot outbreak that occurred during the fieldwork of a face-to-face survey in Barcelona in May 2016, led by a squat group linked to the anti-austerity movement known as the 15-M or indignados that emerged during the financial crisis. By comparing respondents interviewed before and after the riots, it finds that the street violence episode reduced support for the 15-M movement by 12 percentage points on average. However, the magnitude of the effect is highly conditional on the respondents’ predispositions towards the movement. Core supporters, that are expected to share the frame of the movement in justifying violent actions, are the least affected by the violent outbreak. On the other extreme, weak supporters, opposers, and non-aligned citizens reduce their support to a larger extent. Results are robust to different specifications and a wide range of robustness checks. These findings have potentially important implications for movements concerned with broadening their support base.
Under what conditions are individuals more likely to approve of human rights abuses by their governments? While various theoretical expectations have been offered about public approval of repression, many of them have not been directly tested. We analyze the effects of differing opposition tactics, differing government tactics, and legal constraints on approval of repression through a series of survey experiments in India, Israel, and Argentina. Our results indicate that violent action by opposition groups consistently increases support for government repression. In the context of contentious politics, we find that the effects of international law vary by national context. While our respondents in India were less likely to approve of their government when told the government violated international law, the same information likely increased approval of the government in our Israel experiment. The findings provide insights into the microfoundations of existing theories and suggest areas for theory refinement.
Survey experiments often manipulate the description of attributes in a hypothetical scenario, with the goal of learning about those attributes’ real-world effects. Such inferences rely on an underappreciated assumption: experimental conditions must be information equivalent (IE) with respect to background features of the scenario. IE is often violated because subjects, when presented with information about one attribute, update their beliefs about others too. Labeling a country “a democracy,” for example, affects subjects’ beliefs about the country’s geographic location. When IE is violated, the effect of the manipulation need not correspond to the quantity of interest (the effect of beliefs about the focal attribute). We formally define the IE assumption, relating it to the exclusion restriction in instrumental-variable analysis. We show how to predict IE violations ex ante and diagnose them ex post with placebo tests. We evaluate three strategies for achieving IE. Abstract encouragement is ineffective. Specifying background details reduces imbalance on the specified details and highly correlated details, but not others. Embedding a natural experiment in the scenario can reduce imbalance on all background beliefs, but raises other issues. We illustrate with four survey experiments, focusing on an extension of a prominent study of the democratic peace.
This study investigates whether protest movements consisting of students and educated protesters are more likely to (a) use nonviolent rather than violent resistance and (b) successfully reach their goals. Extant literature suggests that education is negatively linked to violent conflict, and the commonly assumed mechanism is that educated groups are less likely to resort to violence. Moreover, many argue that education is a force for regime change and democratization, by inducing successful protest movements. This article is the first to systematically test implications of these mechanisms at the protest level. The empirical analysis builds on original data on the educational background of participants in all protest campaigns aiming for regime change from 1900 to 2006 identified in the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes Dataset 1.0. I find robust evidence that protest movements with a high degree of involvement by students and graduates are more likely to turn nonviolent. Moreover, there is some (although weaker) evidence that these movements are more likely to achieve their goals, but only due to their nonviolent dispositions. This adds to the literature explaining why some movements resort to nonviolence (and succeed), by establishing that the identity and socioeconomic background of protesters matter.
In principle, experiments offer a straightforward method for social scientists to accurately estimate causal effects. However, scholars often unwittingly distort treatment effect estimates by conditioning on variables that could be affected by their experimental manipulation. Typical examples include controlling for posttreatment variables in statistical models, eliminating observations based on posttreatment criteria, or subsetting the data based on posttreatment variables. Though these modeling choices are intended to address common problems encountered when conducting experiments, they can bias estimates of causal effects. Moreover, problems associated with conditioning on posttreatment variables remain largely unrecognized in the field, which we show frequently publishes experimental studies using these practices in our discipline's most prestigious journals. We demonstrate the severity of experimental posttreatment bias analytically and document the magnitude of the potential distortions it induces using visualizations and reanalyses of real‐world data. We conclude by providing applied researchers with recommendations for best practice.
In contrast to the expansive literature on military casualties and support for war, we know very little about public reactions to foreign civilian casualties. This article, based on representative sample surveys in the US and Britain, reports four survey experiments weaving information about civilian casualties into vignettes about Western military action. These produce consistent evidence of civilian casualty aversion: where death tolls were higher, support for force was invariably and significantly lower. Casualty effects were moderate in size but robust across our two cases and across different scenarios. They were also strikingly resistant to moderation by other factors manipulated in the experiments, such as the framing of casualties or their religious affiliation. The importance of numbers over even strongly humanizing frames points towards a utilitarian rather than a social-psychological model of casualty aversion. Either way, civilian casualties deserve a more prominent place in the literature on public support for war.
Challenging conventional wisdom, previous research in South Asia and the Middle East has shown that poverty and exposure to violence are negatively correlated with support for militant organizations. Existing studies, however, provide evidence consistent with two potential mechanisms underlying these relationships: (1) the direct effects of poverty and violence on attitudes toward militant groups and (2) the psychological effects of perceptions of poverty and violence on attitudes. Isolating whether the psychological mechanism is an important one is critical for building theories of mass responses to political violence. We conducted a series of original, large-scale survey experiments in Pakistan (n=16,279) in which we randomly manipulated perceptions of both poverty and violence before measuring support for militant organizations. We find evidence that psychological perceptions do in part explain why the poor seem to be less supportive of militant political groups.
The strong support that African presidents retain among voters of their own ethnicity, despite clear evidence of shirking and corruption, has prompted numerous empirical investigations into whether an incumbent's ethnicity or performance is more important to African voters. The model of vote choice underlying almost all of these studies is additive and implies that either coethnicity or good performance can increase a candidate's vote share. However, there is little theoretical justification for such a model. In the dominant theory of ethnic voting in Africa, coethnicity is a signal of better outcomes, indicating that ethnicity and performance are not separate considerations. Using an experiment that is designed to determine how Ugandan voters make choices, the author shows that the effects of coethnicity and good performance interact: neither attribute increases support for a candidate in the absence of the other. Though previous analyses indicate that, all else being equal, voters always prefer coethnics, this study demonstrates that coethnics only have an advantage when they are not shirkers. Additionally, though previous studies indicate that voters always prefer good performers, this analysis shows that voters are indifferent to the performance of non-coethnic candidates. The article provides evidence that this pattern is in fact a result of voters' beliefs that they will only receive future goods from coethnics, making a demonstrated ability to provide such goods relevant for the electability of coethnic candidates, but not for non-coethnics. Since a large number of African voters do not share the ethnicity of their incumbent, this finding has troubling implications for accountability of African leaders.
This study aims to uncover how horizontal inequality affects support for violent and nonviolent resistance among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. National survey data are introduced to operationalize the mechanisms proposed in the horizontal inequality literature on the individual level. Results point to the operation of political and economic horizontal inequality mechanisms in the Palestinian case. Higher perceived status of civil and political rights is associated with a lower probability of supporting violent over nonviolent resistance. Individuals are also more likely to support violent over nonviolent resistance the larger the difference in household expenditure and consumer durable ownership between their own region and the closest Israeli subdistrict. Corresponding differences in educational attainment have no corresponding effect. The results demonstrate how economic and political horizontal inequality can increase the risk that an individual becomes part of the mobilizational potential of violent social movements. This can lead to participation in a wide range of supportive actions that increase the viability of such movements, ranging from material support to direct participation in violence. The level of public support for violent resistance in key constituencies could also influence public opinion sensitive actors like Hamas in their choice between violent and nonviolent resistance strategies.
This article proposes and argues for the importance of a distinction between "low-" and "high-risk/cost activism" and outlines a model or recruitment to the latter. The model emphasizes the importance of both structural and individual motivational factors in high-risk/cost activism; contending that an intense ideological identification with the values of the movement disposes the individual toward participation, while a prior history of activism and integration into supportive networks acts as the structural "pull" encouraging the individual to make good on his or her strongly held beliefs. The utility of the model is then analyzed in relation to a single instance of high-risk/cost activism: the 1964 Freedom Summer project. Data from project applications for 720 persons who actually went to Mississippi, as well as from 241 "no shows," are used to explain the applicants' chances of participation in terms of various factors. The results of this analysis generally confirm the importance of microstructural fa...
A recent article in this Review has drawn attention to the inadequacies in our knowledge of how great social movements arise. On the Negro protest movement there are many hypotheses but few attempts to relate them to differences in individual behavior. Considerable confusion also exists in the variety of explanatory terms involved. James A. Geschwinder lists five hypotheses that focus variously on economic conditions and the psychological meaning given them. They are the Vulgar Marxist hypothesis—that Negro dissatisfaction results from a progressive deterioration in the social and economic position of the race; the Rising Expectations hypothesis—that Negro expectations are rising more rapidly than their fulfillment; the Sophisticated Marxist hypothesis or the Relative Deprivation hypothesis—that Negro perceptions of white life have led to dissatisfaction with their own rate of improvement; the Rise and Drop hypothesis—that improvement in conditions followed by a sharp drop is responsible; and the Status Inconsistency hypothesis—that a group possessing status attributes ranked differently on various status hierarchies of a society will be dissatisfied and prone to rebellion.
This paper will suggest that theory based on variations in the structure of intergroup relations can go some way toward integrating the different kinds of explanation that have been advanced. A more general aspiration is to draw attention to one set of terms that might be useful in the long overdue development of a genuinely comparative study of social movements such as the Negro movement. The broad hypothesis arising from—but by no means fully tested by—an examination of several individual and contextual variables is that proximity to the dominant white culture increases the likelihood of protest involvement . The analysis will give a priority to structural considerations, but will also suggest something about intervening psychological variables.
Like many major revolutions in history, the East European Revolution of 1989 caught its leaders, participants, victims, and observers by surprise. This paper offers an explanation whose crucial feature is a distinction between private and public preferences. By suppressing their antipathies to the political status quo, the East Europeans misled everyone, including themselves, as to the possibility of a successful uprising. In effect, they conferred on their privately despised governments an aura of invincibility. Under the circumstances, public opposition was poised to grow explosively if ever enough people lost their fear of exposing their private preferences. The currently popular theories of revolution do not make clear why uprisings easily explained in retrospect may not have been anticipated. The theory developed here fills this void. Among its predictions is that political revolutions will inevitably continue to catch the world by surprise.
Part I. Kant's Moral Philosophy: 1. An introduction to the ethical, political, and religious thought of Kant 2. Kant's analysis of obligation: the argument of Groundwork I 3. Kant's formula of universal law 4. Kant's formula of humanity 5. The right to lie: Kant on dealing with evil 6. Morality as freedom 7. Creating the kingdom of ends: reciprocity and responsibility in personal relations Part II. Comparative Essays: 8. Aristotle and Kant on the source of value 9. Two distinctions in goodness 10. The reasons we can share: an attack on the distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral values 11. Skepticism about practical reason 12. Two arguments against lying 13. Personal identity and the unity of agency: a Kantian response to Parfit.
In countries where citizens have strong grievances against the regime,
attempts to address these grievances in the course of daily life are
likely to entail high costs coupled with very low chances of success in
any meaningful sense; consequently, most citizens will choose not to
challenge the regime, thus reflecting the now well-known collective action
problem. When a regime commits electoral fraud, however, an
individual's calculus regarding whether to participate in a protest
against the regime can be changed significantly. This argument yields
important implications for how we interpret the wave of “colored
revolutions” that swept through Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and
Kyrgyzstan in the first half of this decade. Applying the collective
action framework to the colored revolutions also yields a parsimonious
contribution to the political science literature on social protest:
electoral fraud can be a remarkably useful tool for solving the collective
action problems faced by citizens in countries where governments are not,
to use Barry Weingast's language, appropriately restrained by the
populace. While modest, such an observation actually can speak to a
wide-ranging number of questions in the literature, including why people
choose to protest when they do, how protests at one place and time can
affect the likelihood for future protests, and new aspects of the
relationship between elections and protest. a
Of all the many changes of the world economy since World War II, few have been nearly so dramatic as the resurrection of global finance. A review of five recent books suggests considerable diversity of opinion concerning both the causes and the consequences of financial globalization, leaving much room for further research. Competing historical interpretations, stressing the contrasting roles of market forces and government policies, need to be reexamined for dynamic linkages among the variables they identify. Likewise, impacts on state policy at both the macro and micro levels should be explored more systematically to understand not just whether constraints may be imposed on governments but also how and under what conditions, and what policymakers can do about them. Finally, questions are also raised about implications for the underlying paradigm conventionally used for the study of international political economy and international relations more generally.
Economists have long warned about the pernicious impacts of corruption, arguing that it increases transaction costs, reduces investment incentives, and ultimately results in reduced economic growth. Political scientists, on the other hand, ever the realists, have had a much more ambivalent view of the problem. Indeed, much classic literature focusing on the Third World saw corruption as functional for political development, enabling citizens to overcome intransigent, inefficient bureaucracies while increasing loyalty to the political system. More recent research, however, points in the opposite direction toward an erosion of public support for corrupt regimes. A series of serious methodological problems has prevented the testing of these contradictory assertions about the impact of corruption. This article uses national sample survey data, with a total N of over 9,000, from four Latin American countries to test the effect of corruption experiences on belief in the legitimacy of the political system. It finds that independent of socioeconomic, demographic, and partisan identification, exposure to corruption erodes belief in the political system and reduces interpersonal trust. The evidence seems clear, at least for these four countries, that corruption carries with it important political costs.
This review specifies mediating factors between the viewing of violent media and aggressive behavior. The role of cognitive and emotional arousal processes are discussed, as is the interplay among these factors and attitudes toward aggression. Included in these discussions are attention and comprehension of the viewed media, as well as attributions and moral evaluations of the perpetrators of violence. Finally, the effects of media exposure on arousal, emotional desensitization, and the excitement of the observer's aggressive inclinations are presented.
This study aimed to reveal gender differences in willingness to participate in peace encounters with two different types of conflict groups — national and religious. Most previous studies focused on Western countries, measured public opinion, and used a negative definition of peace, usually in support of the use of power. The study employed a longitudinal research design, a positive definition of peace, and a more self-committed perspective towards peace. A national sample of Jewish Israeli students were asked, over a period of 16 months, about their willingness to participate in peace encounters with Arabs and religious or secular Jews in Israel. While no gender differences were found in regard to willingness to participate in such peace encounters, differences emerged in the consistency of attitudes towards peace. Women were more positively consistent in their attitudes towards peace than men. Implications for peace negotiations are discussed.
Using surveys conducted in sixteen mature and newly established democracies around the globe, this study examines the effect of corruption on people's attitudes toward government. The analysis demonstrates that citizens in countries with higher levels of corruption express more negative evaluations of the performance of the political system and exhibit lower levels of trust in civil servants. However, the results also show that the negative effect of corruption on evaluations of the political system is significantly attenuated among supporters of the incumbent political authorities. These findings provide strong and systematic evidence that informal political practices, especially those that compromise important democratic principles, should be considered important indicators of political system performance. Moreover, they imply that, while corruption is a powerful determinant of political support across widely varying political, cultural, and economic contexts, it does not uniformly diminish support for political institutions across all segments of the electorate.
A range of seemingly rival theories attempt to explain why some individuals take extraordinary risks by choosing to participate in armed conflict. To date, however, competing accounts have typically not been grounded in systematic, empirical studies of the determinants of participation. In this article, we begin to fill this gap through an examination of the determinants of participation in insurgent and counterinsurgent factions in Sierra Leone's civil war. We find some support for all of the competing theories, suggesting that the rivalry between them is artificial and that theoretical work has insufficiently explored the interaction of various recruitment strategies. At the same time, the empirical results challenge standard interpretations of grievance-based accounts of participation, as poverty, a lack of access to education, and political alienation predict participation in both rebellion and counterrebellion. Factors that are traditionally seen as indicators of grievance or frustration may instead proxy a for more general susceptibility to engage in violent action or a greater vulnerability to political manipulation by elites.
Women are generally more risk averse than men. We investigated whether between- and within-gender variation in financial risk aversion was accounted for by variation in salivary concentrations of testosterone and in markers of prenatal testosterone exposure in a sample of >500 MBA students. Higher levels of circulating testosterone were associated with lower risk aversion among women, but not among men. At comparably low concentrations of salivary testosterone, however, the gender difference in risk aversion disappeared, suggesting that testosterone has nonlinear effects on risk aversion regardless of gender. A similar relationship between risk aversion and testosterone was also found using markers of prenatal testosterone exposure. Finally, both testosterone levels and risk aversion predicted career choices after graduation: Individuals high in testosterone and low in risk aversion were more likely to choose risky careers in finance. These results suggest that testosterone has both organizational and activational effects on risk-sensitive financial decisions and long-term career choices.
A theory of political transitions
- D Acemoglu
- J A Robinson
Acemoglu, D. & Robinson, J. A. (2001). A theory of political transitions. American
Economic Review, 91(4), 938-963. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.91.4.938