4. A Middle-level Model of Collective Protest in Canada

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Disputes over the size of mass protests have become routine. Organizers want to highlight widespread commitment to their cause and distrust conservative estimates by the media and police. More accurate counts probably will not end these disagreements, but will provide better evidence amidst the partisan squabbling.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2023

S da Costa D Paez MC Marti V Diaz & P Bouchat (2023) Collective Behavior and Social Movements...Frontiers in Psychology 14 doi 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1096877 This protocol operationalizes the predictor variables, the frequency of CB and SM participation, the processes at work during CB episodes, and their outcomes. A first set of variables and instruments aims at examing the level of participation and the factors that lead to participation in SM. Variables of psychological well-being and emotional climate are described as possible criteria for assessing medium-term effects. A second set of variables and instruments can be used to analyse the processes that occur in collective encounters or gatherings (CG) and behaviour (CB), such as demonstrations, collective rituals, meetings, celebrations linked or not to social movements (SM), and their immediate effects. This protocol, based on published and reliable open-access instruments, allows for the investigation of CB and SM, adapting the content to their type and subject matter.

Sociological Inquiry, 1968

A I963 nonviolent mass demonstration f o r civil rights at Durham, N.C., is here described on ihe basis of interviews with participants, businessmen, and politicai figures. A utility model to help account for the personnel, form, and site of such a protest includes the processes o f evoluiion, contagion, and reinforcemeni.

While scholars of nonviolent resistance recognize that large-scale campaigns are more likely to be successful campaigns, we currently have little understanding of why some nonviolent protests grow into mass movements while others do not. In this article, we explore campaign size and, in particular, the role of individual and collective motives in facilitating the growth of nonviolent campaigns. We start by assuming that, after campaign onset, barriers to growth emerge because some aggrieved individuals who are sympathetic to the cause are wary of incurring the (opportunity) costs of participating in campaign rallies. On occasion, we argue, organizers respond to this challenge by staging events that generate rewarding emotional experiences for participants and spectators, such as concerts, mass singing, or other collecti ve expressi ve acts. Since the feelings of empowerment, solidarity, catharsis, or glee that accompany these events can only be enjoyed by those who are physically present at campaign rallies, the provision of such "emotive events" creates an individual-level incentive for passi ve supporter s to mobilize. As this incenti ve attracts new participants, campaigns can growpotentially into large-scale phenomena. To assess the plausibility of our argument, we code original data on emotive events and investigate whether the provision of such events in the course of nonviolent campaigns is associated with the size and scale of those campaigns. Finding this to be the case, we conclude that campaigns that are more creative, humorous, cathartic, and/or fun are also more likely to be large-scale campaigns. Resumen Si bien los académicos de la resistencia pacífica reconocen que las campañas a gran escala tienen más probabilidades de ser campañas exitosas, en la actualidad no entendemos bien por qué algunas protestas pacíficas se convierten en movimientos masivos mientras que otras no. En este artículo, exploramos el tamaño de las campañas y, en particular, el papel de los motivos individuales y colectivos para facilitar el crecimiento de las campañas pacíficas. Partimos de la base de que, una vez iniciada la campaña, surgen barreras al crecimiento porque algunas personas perjudicadas que simpatizan con la causa desconfían de incurrir en los costos (de oportunidad) de participar en las concentra

Protest participation scholarship tends to focus on the special characteristics of novices and the highly committed, underplaying the significance of those in between. In this article, we fill a lacuna in the literature by refocusing attention on four different types of protesters: novices, returners, repeaters, and stalwarts. Employing data from protest surveys of demonstrations that took place in seven European countries (2009-2010), we test whether these types of protesters are differentiated by biographical-structural availability and/or psychological attitudinal engagement. Our results suggest that biographical availability distinguishes our four groups, but not as a matter of degree. Few indicators of structural availability distinguish between the groups of protesters, and emotional factors do not distinguish between them at all. Some political engagement factors suggest similarity between novices and returners. This confirms the need to avoid treating protesters as a homogenous group and reinforces the importance of assessing the contributions of diverse factors to sustaining “protest politics.”

Journal of Social Issues, 2009

2015

Van Stekelenburg, Jacquelien, Bert Klandermans, and Stefaan Walgrave. "Individual participation in street demonstrations." The Wiley Blackwell companion to social movements (2018): 369-391.

Protest participation has become normalized and all sorts of people resort to protest to demand social and political change. Participation in street demonstrations is the prototypical protest activity of citizens today. This chapter focuses on participation in street demonstrations, it first defines and conceptualizes the phenomenon; what is a street demonstration and how can it be distinguished from other gatherings such as riots and hooliganism? Next, focus is on the individual demonstrator: who is s/he, why does s/he participate, and how is s/he mobilized? Individual participation in demonstrations is the consequence of an interaction between individual and collective actors such as parties, interest groups and movement organizations. To illustrate this interaction the concepts of demand, supply and mobilization are used. Then the question how to investigate participation in street demonstrations. In doing so, the chapter distinguishes between methods that focus on the study of the protest events, and methods that focus on the participants. The conclusion raises methodological issues and challenges how scholars have studied the motives and recruitment techniques that bring individuals to a demonstration.

Observing Protest from a Place

Since the rise of the global justice movement (GJM), a number of surveys have been conducted, particularly on the composition of the social forums. This article examines the main surveys (Fisher, Ibase, Reese, Della Porta, Agrikoliansky and Sommier) and the possibility of their cumulative study, a task that curiously has not been undertaken until now. What do these surveys tell us about the activists' socio-biological characteristics, political, and organizational affiliations and ideological beliefs? We will see that, despite their common scientific interests, any comparison is delicate because of the methodology used and the way the questions are formulated. The surveys nevertheless paint a homogeneous portrait of the attendees.