Research Highlights Article
June 28, 2021
Persistent protesting
How do political movements sustain participation over the long run?
July 7, 2019, protesters walk through Tsim Sha Tsui street in Hong Kong.
Tzido
On July 1, 1997, Britain handed back control of Hong Kong to China. And every year since 2003, Hong Kongers have commemorated the day by marching to protect and to extend the civil rights they had grown accustomed to under British rule.
Recent crackdowns have put this year’s march in question, but the peaceful protests have traditionally attracted tens of thousands of participants. This setting may offer important insights into the workings of mass political participation, according to economist Noam Yuchtman.
“If one thinks that these movements are crucial drivers for institutional change, then one wants to understand where these movements come from and what shapes the individual decision to participate in these movements,” Yuchtman told the AEA in an interview.
Yuchtman’s paper in the American Economic Review: Insights explores what kept some of Hong Kong’s protesters coming back to the streets.
In particular, he and his coauthors Leonardo Bursztyn, Davide Cantoni, David Y. Yang, and Y. Jane Zhang studied the choices, beliefs, friendships, and plans of almost 900 students from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology during the 2017 and 2018 July 1st marches.
If one thinks that these movements are crucial drivers for institutional change, then one wants to understand where these movements come from and what shapes the individual decision to participate in these movements.
Noam Yuchtman
One group of study participants received a small sum of money to estimate crowd sizes at the 2017 rallies. By creating an indirect reason for attendance—being present to count the protesters—the authors encouraged attendance without paying directly for turnout. Members of a comparison group were paid to estimate crowd sizes across Hong Kong public transit stations not associated with the marches.
In theory, the difference between the two groups should reveal the extent to which participation in the protests is driven by the experience of having gone to a rally in the past.
The researchers found that the students who were paid to estimate the 2017 marches were indeed more likely to participate the next year—but only if a significant portion of their social network was also incentivized to go.
When half of the cohort from a participant’s major was also paid to estimate 2017 crowd sizes, the student was roughly 6 percentage points more likely to attend the 2018 march. That number jumped to almost 12 percentage points if three quarters of their major cohort was incentivized.
“There's something about you being nudged and others around you being nudged,” Yuchtman said. “You nudge somebody once and they might lose interest even if they participated. But what was really surprising was that the persistence is only maintained when you have this larger group of people in your network who were also nudged at the same time.”
The results indicate that among protesters who aren’t already totally committed to a cause, social networks are critical to the longevity of their political engagement. But that still leaves open the question as to why these group dynamics matter.
A nudge to participate
The chart below shows the proportion of students in the study who participated in the 2017 and 2018 July 1st protests by what percent of their major cohort was nudged to go.
To answer that, the authors looked at three possible explanations: new and deeper friendship, lower coordination costs, and changing minds.
To Yuchtman’s surprise, there wasn’t strong evidence in follow-up surveys that students' political opinions were changed by increased engagement in the pro-democracy movements.
But the surveys did show that the number of new or strengthened friendships grew as more of the participant's major cohort were included in estimating crowd sizes. Those students were also more likely to convert their plans to participate in the 2018 march into action—which likely reflects more knowledge about protesting logistics, such as transportation options, meeting times, and locations.
The findings may offer insights for other political movements, such as Black Lives Matters and the anti-vax movement. In particular, if organizers are deepening the ties between like-minded citizens, they may be laying the foundations of a strong movement.
With today’s technology, that may be something that protest leaders have more control over than ever.
“If you want to organize a movement that isn't just one protest, but produces people who are politically engaged and committed to the movement for the long run, you do that through social groups,” Yuchtman said. “Though it’s beyond the scope of our paper, one would think that social media now offers a potentially powerful platform for keeping those groups together and maintaining that group cohesion and identity.”
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“Persistent Political Engagement: Social Interactions and the Dynamics of Protest Movements” appears in the June 2021 issue of the American Economic Review: Insights.