Repertoires of Political Action: Examining the Role of National Context and Culture by Anna Slavina a Thesis Submitted in Confor

Repertoires of Political Action: Examining the Role of National Context and Culture

Anna Slavina

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Sociology University of Toronto

Repertoires of Political Action: Examining the Role of National Context and Culture

Anna Slavina

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Sociology University of Toronto

2019

Abstract

This dissertation addresses the need for a more nuanced understanding of political engagement. It argues for greater attention to variation in the meaning of diverse forms of political participation cross-nationally. It also draws attention to the relationship between culture and activism. Key aspects of the literature on political participation are tested and revised.

In Chapter 2, I investigate and disaggregate the broad category of non-institutional engagement. I show that, far from being a unified category of action, non-institutional engagement is made up of three distinct repertoires of activism: communicative, individualised and collective. I challenge claims that non-institutional activism is more inclusive than traditional forms of participation by measuring the relative effects of typical predictors

(resources, values and contextual measures) on different repertoires of non-institutional engagement. Important distinctions emerge, pointing to the need for more nuanced definitions of political engagement and greater attention to the relationship between activism, context and individual-level social location.

The relationship between engagement and national context is investigated further in

Chapter 3 where I test Castells’ theory of global social movement development across a variety of countries. Castells’ theory is emblematic of broader trends in the literature that seek to

identify universal pathways to mobilisation. While lending support to parts of his theory regarding online technologies, the findings suggest that national context moderates the way citizens’ dissatisfaction gets translated into engagement.

Cultural factors, at the individual and contextual level, also influence the form that political participation takes. Chapter 4 advocates for a practice theory approach to the study of political behaviour. I show that distinct forms of political participation gain meaning from their location within broader repertoires of political action and from their relationship to individuals’ cultural dispositions and political preferences.

In sum, political engagement is shaped by the national, political and cultural climate in which it occurs. Political practices do not have inherent, universally transposable characteristics that can be used to construct generalising typologies of engagement. To understand how people in diverse settings interact with politics, political sociologists should adopt a more nuanced understanding of political engagement as contextually and socially conditioned cultural practice.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the Chair of my dissertation committee,

Professor Robert Brym. Without his unyielding support, encouragement and guidance, I am confident that my academic development and scholarly work would not have come to where they are today. Bob provided me with innumerable opportunities to grow as a scholar and showed seemingly unbounded generosity with his time, guidance and resources. I know how fortunate I have been to work with him. His approach to mentorship, teaching, writing and thinking are inspirational. His ability to distill critiques, offer praise and guide students in their thinking and writing have made me a better scholar.

I would also like to thank Professors Jack Veugelers and Ron Levi for serving on my dissertation committee. Notably, I am thankful to Professor Jack Veugelers for his guidance and encouragement throughout my doctoral studies. Professor Veugelers’ graduate seminar in classical theory was the first class I ever attended in graduate school. After the class, I remember feeling excited about how much there was to learn and how grateful I was for having such amazing teachers to learn from. I am fortunate that I had the opportunity to continue working with Jack.

Professor Ron Levi has also been instrumental in guiding my thinking and development as a scholar. I always left our meetings with important insight and a new perspective on our topic of discussion. I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to rely on him for his mentorship and guidance.

I would also like to thank Professors Howard Ramos and Clayton Childress for serving on my dissertation examination committee. I am grateful for their generative feedback which has elevated the quality of this work.

Finally, I would like to thank my colleague and partner Jean-François Nault who stayed awake with me during long nights of editing and working, and who encouraged and supported me throughout the entire process.

I would also like to acknowledge the financial support I received for my doctoral studies from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Ontario

Graduate Scholarship (OGS).

I am very fortunate to have had the opportunity to complete my graduate studies at the

University of Toronto. The Department of Sociology here has offered me unparalleled opportunities and support. I want to thank everyone who has worked tirelessly to make that happen.

Table of Contents Abstract ...... ii Acknowledgments...... iv List of Tables and Figures...... viii Chapter 1 - Introduction ...... 1 Political Participation: Then and Now ...... 2 Predicting Political Engagement ...... 7 Research Questions and Outline ...... 12 Main findings ...... 13 Contribution ...... 15 Chapter 2 - Unpacking Non-Institutional Engagement: Collective, Communicative and Individualised Activism ...... 16 Introduction ...... 16 Varieties of Non-Institutional Engagement...... 18 Understanding Political Participation...... 21 Resources and Social Location...... 21 Values and Beliefs ...... 24 Contextual-Level Factors ...... 25 Data and Methods...... 26 Factor Analysis ...... 26 Hierarchical Generalised Linear Models ...... 27 Independent variables ...... 28 Findings ...... 29 Identifying Repertoires of Non-Institutional Engagement...... 29 Overall Participation in Non-Institutional Engagement ...... 33 Disaggregating Non-Institutional Activism ...... 36 Discussion and Conclusion ...... 42 Appendix ...... 44 Chapter 3 - Demonstrating in the Internet Age: A Test of Castells’ Theory ...... 45 Globalised Protest and its Limits ...... 45 Social Movements in the Internet Age ...... 46 Criticisms of Techno-Optimism ...... 48 Testing the Extent of Protest Mobilisation ...... 51

Hypotheses ...... 52 Methods ...... 55 Data Source, Dependent Variable, Sample ...... 55 Model and Independent Variables ...... 59 Findings ...... 62 Discussion and Conclusion ...... 71 Study Limitations and Future Research ...... 73 Chapter 4 - Cultures of Engagement: A New Approach to Explaining Variation in Political Action Repertoires ...... 74 Contemporary Understandings of Political Engagement ...... 76 Political Engagement as Cultural Practice ...... 78 Analytical Strategy for Measuring Relational Meaning Structures ...... 84 Data and Methods...... 85 Country-Specific Repertoires ...... 90 Cross-National Patterns of Engagement ...... 92 Mapping Repertoires in the Space of Political Action ...... 96 Discussion and Conclusion ...... 103 Appendix ...... 106 Chapter 5 - Conclusion ...... 107 Limitations and Future Research...... 110 References ...... 113

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List of Tables and Figures

Chapter 2 Table 1: Results for the Factor Analysis on Political Engagement Items ...... 30 Table 2: Participation in Non-Institutional Political Engagement Repertoires by Country, in Percent ...... 33 Table 3: Results for the HGLM (Logistic) Model on Overall Non-Institutional Activism ...... 34 Table 4: Results for the HGLM (Logistic) Models on Different Repertoires of Activism ...... 37 Table A1: Descriptive Statistics for HGLM Models ...... 44

Chapter 3 Figure 1: Castells’ Theory of Global Protest ...... 52 Table 1: Percent Ever Demonstrated and Email/Internet Use by Country ...... 58 Table 2: Logistic Mixed Model for Demonstrating, WVS Waves 5 and 6 ...... 63 Figure 2: Predicted Probability of Demonstrating in Low, Medium and High Inequality Contexts by Trust in Government...... 65 Figure 3: Predicted Probability of Demonstrating in Contexts with Low, Medium and High Perceived Democracy by Level of Economic Satisfaction ...... 67

Chapter 4 Table 1 - Results of the Overall Latent Class Analysis (All Countries) – Probability of Engaging in Each Form of Political Activity ...... 94 Figure 1 – MCA Results / MCA Map Variable and Category Labels ...... 97 Table A1 – Descriptive Statistics for MCA ...... 106

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Chapter 1

Introduction

Political engagement is an important barometer of a country’s political system. Differences in who engages, and the form that this engagement takes, reflect and reinforce systems of culture, structure and inequality that mediate relationships between citizens and the state. Therefore, the study of political engagement has been of vital importance to sociologists and political scientists who seek to understand the interactive relationships linking people to politics.

Cross-national comparative work on political behaviour has been at the forefront of this initiative. Proceeding from the premise that robust political participation is generally good for the maintenance of democracy, and that inequality in political engagement results in the exclusion of marginalised populations from representation in the political process, work in this tradition seeks to operationalise and explain variation in political participation by focusing on the individual- and contextual-level factors that encourage or hinder political activism. While this work has been important in highlighting how resources, grievances, values and national political and economic structures condition differences in political participation, it hinges on several problematic assumptions about the meaning of, and motivations behind political activism. These assumptions include the presumed equivalence of different forms of engagement within and across countries, the existence of universal mechanisms of mobilisation, an overreliance on resource- and rational- choice-based explanations of action, and the reduction of culture to instrumental values.

This chapter surveys the development and current state of the political engagement literature and challenges the assumptions underlying the way political engagement is defined and predicted. I argue that approaches that view activism as a monolithic concept or which seek to identify discrete categories of political activities and outline universal pathways to political

mobilisation oversimplify the meaning of political engagement within and across diverse contexts.

As a result, they mis-specify the mechanisms that contribute to differences in political participation. Drawing on recent work in the field of cultural sociology, I also advocate an alternative understanding of political activism as culturally rooted practice. Drawing on these arguments, I next outline the research questions guiding this dissertation and its major findings.

Political Participation: Then and Now

Cross-national comparative research on political behaviour was revolutionised by Gabriel

Almond and Sidney Verba. The 1959 Civic Culture Survey (CCS) on which they based their work was the first nationally representative survey that allowed for the comparison of political engagement in multiple countries and focused scholarly attention on the relationship between political engagement, national culture and individual-level characteristics such as education and income. At the same time, the CCS framed the way that political action research would be conducted in the future. Major databases, including the World Values Survey (WVS), the

International Social Survey Program (ISSP) and the European Social Survey (ESS) are modeled on Almond and Verba’s original design. Consequently, cross-national analyses of political activism have continued to hinge on certain assumptions about how engagement should be operationalised and studied.

One important and often overlooked legacy of this early work is how political engagement is defined. In their study of activism in the United States, Verba and Nie (1972) drew on CCS data and defined political behaviour as action intended to affect the choice of governmental personnel and/or policies. Predictably, this narrow definition was contested. Debates as to what counts as political action and how these activities differ from one another continue today. In addition to

partitioning the literature into analyses of voting and party membership on one hand and non- electoral forms of engagement (including demonstrating and boycotting) on the other, these debates helped define the ontological and epistemological principles that guide the study of political action in the contemporary literature.

Verba and Nie’s (1972) distinction between electoral and non-electoral activism was based on the manifest characteristics of those activities. The authors sought to identify a limited number of dimensions along which political acts can be differentiated into distinct modes of engagement

(Verba et al. 1973). These categories were assumed to have cross-national equivalence, attract different types of individuals and have different political consequences. In this model, activities have inherent, stable and known characteristics that precede or condition how they are practiced by actors. Contemporary studies largely continue to operate on the assumption that different political activities can be grouped into mutually exclusive categories based on similarities in their manifest attributes, and that similar factors can explain their prevalence within and across countries.

The most generalising studies proceed by simply collapsing diverse tactics ranging from demonstration attendance to petition signing or boycotting into an overall scale of “non-electoral” or “non-institutional” engagement (Dalton, Sickle and Weldon 2010; Fennema and Tillie 1999;

Gil de Zuniga, Jung and Valenzuela 2012; Guarnizo, Portes and Haller 2003; La Due Lake and

Huckfeldt 1998). In these studies, the most important attribute differentiating forms of political engagement is the activity’s proximity to electoral institutions. It is assumed that all activities taking place outside of electoral politics are essentially equivalent in their meaning and availability across countries and for different segments of a population. When these scales are used as an outcome in predictive models it becomes impossible to distinguish differences in how predictors

are associated with each of the constitutive activities. As a consequence, scale approaches obscure qualitative differences between diverse forms of political action. Yet, protesting and petition signing, which are treated as equal when collapsed into a scale, carry different risks and costs and may be more or less available in some national contexts and for some segments of a population.

Scale approaches remain common in studies of political behaviour, but recent work has attempted to address some of their shortcomings by seeking to identify more specific typologies of political practice. These studies generally fall into one of two categories: those that focus on the costs and risks associated with political action and those that focus on the attributes of political activities.

Researchers who delineate different forms of engagement based on the hypothesised risk or cost of different political activities (Back, Teorell and Westholm 2011; Brady Schlozman and

Verba 1999; Brady, Verba and Schlozman 1995; Wiltfang and McAdam 1991) envision the political activist as a rational actor who weighs the costs of engagement against potential benefits.

In this line of research, forms of engagement that are perceived by the researcher to be more public, dangerous or costly are classified as high risk or high investment, in contrast to other potentially lower-risk or lower-cost forms of activism. Individual- and contextual-level factors including the actor’s income and level of political efficacy are understood to mitigate the costs or risks associated with participation. Once again, the supposed objective characteristics associated with activities

(cost or risk) drive differences in political engagement. These attributes are understood to be measurable, consistent over time and place and of material importance in directing how actors engage in politics.

The same is true for approaches that seek to identify specific categories of political engagement. These types of engagement include political consumption, online activism, protest

politics and so on (Copeland 2014; Oser et al. 2013; Teorell et al. 2007). Distinctions between forms of activism are often derived theoretically, based on the characteristics of activities that the authors believe to be important, and their validity is rarely tested cross-nationally. Because these studies tend to focus on each category of action in isolation, their findings speak to the individual- and contextual-level factors that correspond to singular forms of practice, not to differences in how people in distinct social or national locations engage in politics. As a result, the literature is rife with competing categorisations of engagement, but no broader understanding of how strategies of political action vary across countries or segments of a population.

The problem with approaches focusing on attribute similarity is that political activities have many characteristics that may or may not influence how they are practiced by real people. For example, demonstrating and discussing politics in online forums can be categorised in terms of their risk or in terms of their use of online technologies. If a researcher is using the category of risk to construct their measure of engagement, these activities would be split into different groups. The same is true if the focus is on online vs. offline forms of engagement. In reality, an actor may participate in both activities for a third reason – as a way to engage in meaningful communication with other activists.

Furthermore, some categories of engagement – such as political consumption – may not represent salient groupings of activities when diverse national contexts are compared. In countries with less developed economies and commodity markets, actors may have limited access to diverse consumer goods, limiting the viability of political buying or boycotting as options for engagement.

Some features of political activities also vary according to context. For instance, the risks and costs associated with activities may not be the same across countries and for different segments of a population. These limitations call into question which characteristics are important for describing

differences in engagement and whether the supposed characteristics of activities should be used to construct categories of action at all. When researchers choose one attribute to construct their engagement typology – be it risk or the online nature of the action – they assume that this feature is meaningful in delineating types of political engagement and overlook how people in diverse contexts actually organise political action.

The political action literature is due for a revision that takes diversity in political repertoires seriously. This means reassessing the validity of generalising scales and commonly used typologies of activism. Scales need to be disaggregated into meaningful categories of action that are uncovered inductively from patterns observed in data, not deductively derived from theory.

Scholars also need to pay attention to how individual- and contextual-level factors condition the development of different strategies of political action through research that is comparative and cross-national.

Chapter 2 raises to this challenge by using cross-national social survey data to unpack the broad concept of non-institutional engagement. I examine how individual- and contextual-level variables are associated with different strategies of non-institutional activism. Chapter 4 takes this initiative one step further by drawing on recent developments in the field of cultural sociology to examine how different political activities take on meaning as a result of their relational position to other activities within actors’ repertoires. Rather than attempting to devise a typology of activism,

I argue that political action is a form of cultural practice which is conditioned by actors’ experiences within distinct social and cultural contexts.

Cultural sociologists focusing on theories of action have developed a promising avenue for understanding patterns in political engagement that dispenses with overreliance on the manifest attributes of activities. Practice theorists argue that recurrent experiences in particular institutional

and material environments contribute to the development of durable embodied dispositions, skills and cognitive schemas that direct action (Bourdieu 1984; Lizardo and Strand 2010). People who occupy similar social locations overlap in their daily experiences and interpretations of the political situations they encounter. Shared experiences contribute to the development of similar and contextually appropriate embodied cultural and political dispositions that direct action. This in turn results in discernible differences in patterns of political participation. In other words, when individuals decide to engage in politics, they do not make the choice to become high-risk activists and then begin engaging in only the most risky and public forms of protest. Rather, the decision to engage in one form of participation over another relies on the actor’s unconscious sense of affinity and comfort with certain forms of practice. In this model, it is the actor’s location within social structure, and the subsequent development of a radical habitus (Crossley 2003), not the characteristics of activities, that come first and explain cross-national and class-based differences in engagement.

In short, I argue that instead of focusing on the characteristics of political activities, scholars should focus on systematic differences in how people engage and then locate these patterns in the broader political and social structures that condition their experience of the social world. This argument implies that political activities do not have inherent and universal characteristics and that the meaning of political action varies across time, context and for differently situated actors.

Predicting Political Engagement

After identifying a focal category of political action, scholars typically proceed by attempting to predict who is more or less likely to engage in this form of practice. Operating on

the assumption that different types of political activity are linked to specific individual- and contextual-level characteristics, differences in engagement are generally predicted using individual-level measures of socio-economic resources, grievances and values, and contextual- level measures of political structure, national resources and values. These explanations typically rely on a rational-actor model of political behaviour or attempt to identify broad and universalising mechanisms of mobilisation.

Measures of personal resources can include income, education, political competency and the size and density of individuals’ networks. At the contextual level, level of democracy and national wealth are understood to be resources that facilitate political action (Dalton, Sickle and

Weldon 2010; DiGrazia 2014; Marien et al. 2010; McVeigh and Smith 1999; Stolle and Hooghe

2011). In some cases, these individual- and contextual-level resource measures are included in the same model and the analysis focuses on discovering which variables have the strongest effects on political engagement. In other cases, the analysis focuses on disaggregating a particular resource such as networks developed through voluntary organisation membership to understand which subset of the resource is most conducive to increased political engagement. Regardless of how measures are operationalised, the assumption behind resource-based explanations is a rational- choice model of political action. Brady, Verba and Schlozman (1995) argue that resources, including time, money and civic skills, mitigate the costs of political engagement, thus contributing to higher levels of participation. Networks facilitate political engagement because they expose members to particular forms of knowledge, both in terms of participation opportunities and broader civic skills. For example, McAdam’s (1986) famous study of the Freedom Summer protests posits that having supportive individuals in one’s network alleviates some of the psychological costs of high-risk political engagement. Similarly, at the contextual level, living in a country with robust

democratic institutions and the rule of law is believed to reduce the potential risk associated with public forms of protest, such as demonstrations (Dalton, Sickle and Weldon 2010), while strong economic institutions make it easier to engage in financial forms of activism such as boycotts

(Koos 2012).

Resource measures are meant to capture actors’ ability to act. Grievances, on the other hand, explain the motivation behind political action. In a cost-benefit approach to engagement, the easing of grievances represents the expected benefit of political engagement. Like resources, grievances can be measured at the contextual level and include variables such as national inequality, low levels of democracy and low national wealth. In the quantitative literature, measures of grievances at the individual level are less prevalent. Scholars following the structuralist tradition tend to background “personalogical” factors such as grievances and attitudinal affinity (McAdam 1986) to focus on measures of biographical availability, resources and other factors that mitigate the costs of political activism. Recently, qualitative work on social movements and globalisation has revived interest in the study of personal grievances.

A typical example of how grievances are used to understand recent trends in political engagement is Castells’ (2015) book on the development of global social movements. His analysis follows the process by which deep and widespread financial and political dissatisfaction grows into global patterns of resistance disseminated through online communication. According to

Castells, the development of global social movements follows a predictable path. Grievances and access to online technologies are assumed to have the same general effect on protest rates in diverse countries. Castells’ search for a universal explanation for mobilisation is a common theme in the political engagement literature, where analyses are generally structured under the assumption that

key relationships, for example between resources and high-risk activism, are consistent across diverse contexts.

However, standard predictors of political engagement likely operate differently across national contexts and for different forms of engagement. In Chapters 2 I investigate this possibility by examining how differences in resources contribute to inequalities in access to some forms of political engagement. Similarly, in Chapter 3 I zero in on protest to investigate how national context moderates the relationship between grievances and rates of demonstrating.

Rational-choice explanations have also been criticized for oversimplifying the relationship between resources and engagement. For instance, Laurison (2016) shows that while resources such as high income allow actors to “buy in” to costly forms of engagement, the relationship between class and activism is also cultural. Cultural expectations about who can and should engage in politics are shaped by class and gender norms. People who are employed in high status, high earning jobs are more likely to be invited to engage in politics. This contributes to a sense of competence and comfort with activism that promotes further participation. In contrast, people with fewer resources tend to be more socially distant from politics or might believe that politics is not for “people like me” (Laurison 2016: 690). This class-based differentiation also feeds into broader cognitive schemas and symbolic codes of affinity and aversion that condition the emotional response that people have to political issues and their level of dissatisfaction or grievances (Polletta and Lee 2006; Polletta 1999; Jasper 1997). In other words, grievances are not abstract variables that are evenly distributed across a population. They are conditioned by the actor’s location in particular social and economic structures.

Culture is an important mechanism for understanding how social location and grievances translate into political engagement. Unfortunately, in the quantitative literature, culture is typically

defined narrowly as consisting of instrumental values. A classic example is Inglehart’s measures of postmaterialist values. Inglehart (1997) argues that as people gain more access to financial resources, their values shift from predominantly materialist concerns focused on personal safety and financial survival to postmaterialist concerns that give greater importance to self-expression, equality and personal liberty. In the political engagement literature, postmaterialist values have been linked to greater involvement in non-institutional forms of engagement that challenge the status quo (Dalton 2008). Arguing that people engage in activities that best align with their broader values, this stream of literature suggests that those who value self-determination and autonomy will be less likely to engage with the state through more traditional forms of participation such as voting.

The main problem with a values-based approach is that, like the resources model, it is at its core a rational action approach to activism (Whitford 2002). It assumes that people will always take the most direct and least costly path to achieve predetermined, valued outcomes. When valued outcomes include personal autonomy from the state, the theory posits that people will engage in extra-institutional action. However, values are not sufficient for predicting action (Blake 1999) and do not account for the embodied culture (Crossley 2003; Swidler 1986) necessary for political engagement. In addition to having specific values, political activists must have the appropriate dispositions or embodied culture to envision themselves engaging in activism and the cultural skills to know how to act (Bourdieu 1984; Bruch and Soss 2018; Laurison 2006; Swidler 1986).

Recently, expanded definitions of culture as embodied dispositions and preferences have slowly been integrated into political sociology. Unfortunately, most analyses remain theoretical

(Crossley 2003); focused on the actions of organised social movements rather than on the behaviour of people (DeLay 2008; Jasper 2006); or lacking a cross-national focus (Sommer-

Harris 2013). In short, the promise of an expanded definition of culture as a motor for action has not been fully realised in the study of political participation.

Research Questions and Outline

Expanded access to representative cross-national data has resulted in major advances in quantitative studies on political engagement. However, contemporary approaches remain grounded in unsupported assumptions about the meaning of political action and remain largely insensitive to the contextually and culturally rooted nature of political participation. Political engagement is measured as an all-encompassing scale or operationalised based on often untested categorisations that are assumed to be universally valid. At the same time, overreliance on standard predictors rooted in a rational-choice approach to political action has contributed to stagnation in research. The political engagement literature is due for a revival that attends to the importance of social and national context and applies a broader understanding of political culture.

In light of these arguments, this dissertation engages with three broad questions, each constituting the premise of a chapter:

Chapter 2 examines the overarching concept of non-institutional engagement. Using representative data on 33 countries from the 2014 International Social Survey Program (ISSP) on citizenship, I investigate whether this category represents a unified and internally consistent form of practice or confounds diverse forms of participation that may be more available to some people rather than others. Using factor analysis, I uncover categories of non-institutional engagement reflecting different strategies of political action. I then use hierarchal logistic modeling to examine whether these strategies are differentially available to people from different social and national

backgrounds. This analysis supports further investigation into how people in diverse social and national contexts organise strategies for political engagement.

In Chapter 3 I focus on protest to assess whether standard predictors of participation operate differently across national contexts. Using World Values Survey (WVS) data on 25 countries, I use hierarchal logistic modeling to challenge Manuel Castells’ (2015) assertion that the development of global social movements follows a predictable and universal path of widespread political and economic grievances translating into protest through horizontal communication that is facilitated by the Internet and other new information technologies. This analysis highlights the importance of national context in moderating the process through which grievances translate into activism.

Finally, in Chapter 4, I draw on data from the 2014 ISSP to extend the insights garnered in

Chapters 2 and 3 and examine how respondents from 32 countries organise available political engagement strategies into coherent repertoires of political activism. Using Latent Class Analysis

(LCA), I capture both diversity and regional similarity in the composition of political action repertoires. I then use Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to resituate variation in political engagement within the political, structural and cultural realities experienced by individuals. I do this by mapping patterns of association between repertoires, national context and individual-level political dispositions and preferences.

Main findings

Chapter 2 complicates the simple distinction between institutional and non-institutional engagement that continues to guide much of the research on political activism. Factor analysis results show that the broad category or scale of non-institutional activism confounds three distinct

modes of engagement. Rather than capturing differences in risk, investment or activity type, these strategies of engagement contrasts different ways in which people communicate demands to governing elites and other citizens. Communicative, individualised and collective strategies are differentially available across national contexts and for different segments of a population. By disaggregating the concept of non-institutional activism, this chapter reveals how different forms of social and economic inequality condition political participation.

Chapter 3 highlights the importance of national context for understanding political engagement and the need to make important qualifications to Castells’ (2015) overly deterministic theory of protest and social movement development. A cross-national test of Castells’ theory suggests that while use of online communication technologies significantly increases the odds of engaging in protest, national context – including levels of democracy and social inequality – moderates the way that grievances are translated into activism.

The relationship between social and national location and variation in political engagement is picked up again in Chapter 4. Drawing on insights from practice theory and recent literature linking political action to work in cultural sociology on repertoires and habitus (Crossley 2003;

Fourcade, Lande and Schofer 2016; Lamprianou 2013), I show that ten forms of political participation are integrated differently into distinctly national repertoires of contention. The relational structure of political engagement practices within repertoires, rather than the characteristics of the activities themselves, capture cross-national differences in political engagement. Notwithstanding cross-national variation, regional similarities emerge. To link differences in engagement to actors’ social and national location, I map the associations between dominant political repertoires, national context and individuals’ political dispositions. Based on

the findings, I argue that variation in political engagement reflects the influence of specific styles or cultural toolkits for political action.

Contribution

This dissertation calls into question some of the major assumptions of the political engagement literature. It calls for increased attention to the meaning of political action and the importance of national context in moderating the relationship between individual level predictors and political engagement.

Political engagement is a broad and diverse category of social action that reflects social, structural and cultural processes linking people to politics. Different forms of engagement carry different meanings depending on actors’ social and national location. Consequently, collapsing all forms of engagement into a scale of activism or imposing categories based on attributes such as risk a priori obscures how real people engage politically in daily life.

I argue that understanding differences in political engagement as differences in action repertoires advances the study of political engagement. If political action is understood to be conditioned through daily experiences in distinct social locations, we can begin to account for diversity in political engagement strategies. Replacing static, universal categories or models of political behaviour with an approach that situates the actor in social and political contexts can result in a better understanding of how systems of culture, structure and inequality produce and are reproduced by the relationships between people and politics.

Chapter 2

Unpacking Non-Institutional Engagement: Collective, Communicative and Individualised Activism

Introduction

Engagement in traditional forms of political participation, such as voting and political party membership, is consistently shown to be stratified by markers of socio-economic privilege

(DiGrazia 2014; Laurison 2006; Marien et al. 2010). Women, low income earners and other marginalised groups are less likely to engage and therefore to be represented in the political process. However, levels of voter turnout and party membership have been declining in many

Western democracies while engagement in non-institutional activism – such as petitions, boycotts and demonstrations – has been increasing (Micheletti 2002; Inglehart 1997; Dalton 2008). This shift has been seen by some scholars as indicative of a weakening of traditional patterns of stratification in political engagement (Dalton 2004, 2008; Inglehart and Catterberg 2002). Because many of these activities are sporadic, direct, can be incorporated into daily routines and require the mobilisation of few economic or social resources, they create expanded opportunities for political engagement. Engagement in non-institutional activism has also been linked to more egalitarian ideals and critical citizenship norms signalling a change in political preferences toward continued democratisation and inclusion in the political process (Dalton 2004, 2008; Inglehart 1997). Others have countered that non-institutional engagement actually requires more resources and skills from participants than do institutional forms of activism and show that rates of engagement vary considerably cross-nationally (Brady et al. 1996; Dalton et al. 2009).

However, non-institutional engagement is not a monolithic concept. Several types of qualitatively different activities occur outside of legitimised governmental institutions. These

activities cluster in distinct repertoires of claims making routines (Tilly 2006). Actors are more likely to engage in activities that align with broader skills and preferences that they develop through daily interaction with particular social and structural contexts. Therefore, engagement in one form of non-institutional activism rather than another depends on the participant’s location within broader webs of social relations and their resources, values and political preferences

(Bourdieu 1984; Laurison 2006). Yet, when scholars study non-institutional engagement, they typically measure activism using a single scale that collapses different activities into one composite measure or focus on discrete types of non-institutional engagement, such as online or consumer- based activism. These analyses rarely compare different repertoires of non-institutional engagement directly.

In contrast, this chapter uses cross-national data from the 2014 wave of the International

Social Survey Program (ISSP) on Citizenship to unpack the concept of non-institutional engagement. I identify three distinct repertoires of non-institutional activism: communicative, individualised and collective forms. These repertoires contrast different strategies for expressing demands to the state or to other citizens that may be more or less attractive to people with different socio-economic backgrounds, resources, and political values. National context matters too.

Attending demonstrations may be particularly risky in non-democratic countries, while signing petitions and contacting the media may be more common in countries with a long tradition of such practices. Multi-level logistic modelling is used to capture individual- and contextual-level differences in repertoires of non-institutional engagement.

I argue that researchers need to pay more attention to the specificity of diverse forms of political activism. Comparing differences within non-institutional activism allows researchers to address questions regarding the relative inclusivity of different forms of engagement, both in terms

of overall engagement rates and in terms of patterns of stratification based on factors such as gender, class, resources and citizenship.

Varieties of Non-Institutional Engagement

The early literature on political engagement drew distinctions between “conventional” forms of political participation such as voting and party membership and unconventional or

“emerging” forms including protests, boycotts and petition signing (Barnes and Kaase 1979;

Inglehart and Catterberg 2002). Recognising the steady normalisation of emerging political repertoires since the 1970s, more recent analyses have switched to the language of institutional and non-institutional activism (Marien et al. 2010; Kaase 1999).

However, little consensus exists as to the sorts of activities that should be defined as non- institutional engagement. The number of activities included under this label is constantly expanding and can range from donating money to helping a neighbour (van Deth 2014). Moreover, there is little consistency in the attributes that differentiate non-institutional activities from institutional ones. Much of the confusion emerges from the conflation of the goals of political action (why people are engaging) with the means of engagement (how they are engaging)

(Lamprianou 2013). For instance, while the act of attending a political meeting or rally may, for some, signal an individual’s membership in a legitimised institution such as a political party, decidedly extra-institutional organisations (such as anarchist or neo-Nazi groups) also stage political rallies.

In the context of this chapter, only activities that imply behaviours (or purposeful abstention from an activity) that target political or broader community problems are included in the definition of political engagement. These activities must also be defined as political by the

actor. For instance, buying or boycotting a particular brand of shoes does not constitute political engagement unless the actor means to target corporate interests with this action (Teorell et al. 2007; van Deth 2014). Moreover, only activities that occur outside the context of formal, legitimised electoral institutions are defined as non-institutional engagement. Voting and political party membership are fully contained within these institutions while activities such as demonstrating, boycotting and contacting others to express demands allow actors to support or engage with informal and non-legitimised institutions or causes.

The various activities included under this definition of non-institutional activism represent qualitatively different forms of engagement. Each may be more or less accessible to some populations than others and should therefore not be subsumed under a single scale, as is often done in the political engagement literature (Dalton 2004, 2008; Norris 2007; Stolle and Hooghe 2011;

Welzel and Deutsch 2011). However, it would also be incorrect to assume that non-institutional engagement is made up of fully heterogeneous activities that do not overlap in meaning. By defining repertoires as clusters of “claims making routines”, Tilly (2006: 40) argues that political action repertoires represent “meaning structures” made up of tactics that cluster into distinct roles that remain more or less stable over time (Ring-Ramirez et al. 2014). Identifying such repertoires within the broader category of non-institutional engagement is the first step toward evaluating its relative inclusivity.

Much of the work in political sociology relies on typologies that group activities based on perceived attribute similarity (e.g. risk or cost), or on typologies that use data to identify specific forms of action (e.g. Internet-based or protest politics) which are then studied in isolation (Marien et al. 2010; Hunter et al. 2004; Ekman and Amna 2012; van Deth 2014; Copeland 2014; Koos

2012; Oser et al. 2013). The first approach often fails to test conceptual distinctions empirically,

across different national contexts, while the latter approach has resulted in the proliferation of engagement types but not in the development of a clear typology of non-institutional activism.

Developing such a typology requires conceptually driven empirical work that is attentive to the diverse ways that people communicate with their state and with each other.

According to Michelleti (2002), one of the consequences of the globalising political landscape is the expansion of arenas through which citizens can exert political pressure. Political demands no longer need to be targeted at institutional actors or expressed manifestly by the activist through personal messaging. The way political activists interact with each other has also changed.

Political engagement no longer requires membership in hierarchical, interest-aggregating organisations such as social movements or face-to-face contact with other people. People can express their political demands anonymously or in the privacy of their home through individualised life-style choices.

This distinction between activities that require the direct, public communication of demands and activities that employ indirect, impersonal pressure is highlighted by Teorell et al.’s

(2007) work on mechanisms of influence. They argued that different forms of engagement vary in the extent to which they demand the exercise of the actor’s voice or rely on “exit-based” strategies where people express generalised support or opposition for a political issue. However, this focus prioritises the vertical relationships that people have with the state and other powerful actors. In reality, political participation is also a form of horizontal social interaction. Social change often occurs on a micro, cultural level as people interact with each other through direct communication and deliberation or through more indirect performances and symbols (e.g., the purchase or display of consumer items) (Swidler 1995). Teorell et al.’s (2007) work therefore overlooks the important conceptual distinction between activities that require face-to-face contact with other people

(collective activities) and those that can be done privately or even anonymously. This distinction is important not only because it highlights the diverse ways that political engagement can produce social change but also because different forms of communication may draw on resources and skills that are unevenly distributed across the population. A fully specified typology of political engagement should consider the different styles of communicating and social organising that connect activists to the state and to each other and test these distinctions empirically across diverse national contexts.

Understanding Political Participation

The literature on political engagement typically associates patterns of political participation with three categories of predicting variables: (1) resources and social location; (2) individual-level values; and (3) contextual-level structure.

Resources and Social Location

The ability to participate politically is not evenly distributed across populations (Brady et al. 1996; Marien et al. 2010). Individuals require sufficient resources, skills and knowledge to translate interests and grievances into meaningful political action (Dalton et al. 2009). Political engagement also varies by the actor’s location within broader webs of social and structural inequality that shapes their political dispositions and ability to translate resources into political action (Bruch and Soss 2018; Bourdieu 1984; Laurison 2006).

Resources can include education, income and cultural capital. They can translate into differences in activism in three ways. First, inequality in resources can lead to direct exclusion

from political activities that require the deployment of those resources. For instance, low earnings may deny someone the capacity to donate to a political cause.

Second, resources also account for variation in engagement indirectly, by conditioning the development of networks and broader dispositions that connect people to politics. For instance, employment in prestigious, professional (and likely high-earning) jobs connects actors to other high-status individuals, including activists and politicians, and varied opportunities for political participation. This allows actors to develop a sense of competence and comfort with political engagement that promotes further participation (Bourdieu 1984; Laurison 2006; Sommer

Harrits 2013).

Third, resources intersect with other aspects of social and structural inequality that produce differences in activism. An actor’s location in intersecting structures of class, race and gender condition the extent to which traditional resources, such as income or education, can be translated into activism. Education is an important resource for political action (Brady et al. 1995). However, women and people of colour have vastly different schooling experiences which affect how they perceive and interact with authority later in life, moderating the extent to which education translates into activism (Bruch and Soss 2018). Moreover, cultural expectations around who is qualified to hold a political opinion or engage in activism guide how people from different socio- economic backgrounds think about and situate themselves within politics, affecting the kinds of activities they feel comfortable engaging in (Laurison 2006). This sense of confidence or cultural affinity with some forms of engagement over others contribute to gender and class-based differences in political activism.

While participation in institutional forms of engagement is consistently shown to be stratified by income, education and social capital (DiGrazia 2014; Laurison, 2006; Marien et al.

2010; McVeigh and Smith 1999; Stolle and Hooghe 2011), the relationship between non- institutional activism and resources is less straightforward. Some evidence suggests that non- institutional political activities are more inclusive both in terms of the absolute number of participants and in terms of the resources required for engagement. Moreover, specific forms of non-institutional activism better align with the cultural and class-based dispositions of differentially situated actors (Sommer Harrits 2013).

For instance, individualised forms of activism, such as petition signing and boycotting, are more accessible to women because they allow participants to integrate political engagement with daily routines and align with traditional gendered expectations of women’s role in the private sphere (Hunter et al. 2004; Marien et al. 2010). Higher rates of engagement by women and younger people also reflect the more inclusive nature of non-institutional forms of activism in-so-far as these participants tend to be relatively disadvantaged in terms of resources that can be used to facilitate activism (Marien et al. 2010; Stolle and Hooghe 2011).

Other researchers hold that non-institutional activism is not more inclusive than institutional forms. Participation in non-institutional activism overall remains positively associated with higher levels of education, income and social capital (Brady et al. 1995; Cicatiello et al. 2015;

Dalton et al. 2009; Oser et al. 2013). In terms of broader political expression, Laurison (2015) finds that low-income individuals are less likely to voice political opinions in surveys, suggesting that communicative repertoires may be stratified by class. Inequality in social capital and networks is also an important factor. Networks developed through membership in voluntary organisations connect actors with a wide range of people, increasing the odds that they will be invited to engage politically (Teorell 2003). High levels of social capital are often coupled with higher levels of economic capital, but these resources may have divergent effects on a specific form of engagement.

For instance, while social capital has been cited as the single strongest predictor of engagement in protest (Diani 2004; McAdam and Paulsen 1993; Schussman and Soule 2005), demonstrating may be more accessible to people with fewer financial resources as it involves little to no financial cost and has historically allowed marginalised groups to express their demands (DiGrazia 2014;

Saunders et al. 2012; McVeigh and Smith 1999).

Unfortunately, the above studies have not examined how differences in resources translate into participation in different forms of non-institutional engagement. Different markers of privilege may be associated with some forms of engagement but not with others.

Values and Beliefs

Political values and beliefs are important in understanding how and to what extent individuals engage politically. Dalton (2008) argues that a shift from “duty-based citizenship”, stressing social order and obligation, to “engaged citizenship”, stressing autonomy and critical thinking, has resulted in the decline of traditional forms of political engagement and the rise of extra-institutional engagement predicated on individualised, direct forms of action.

Indeed, individuals who value equality, autonomy and freedom tend to engage in non- institutional activism at a higher rate than people who do not (Dalton et al. 2009; Inglehart and

Catterberg 2002; Stolle et al. 2005; Straughn and Andriot 2011). Beliefs regarding the state and one’s role in the political system also affect engagement. Mistrust of government is associated with increased engagement in non-institutional activism (Copeland 2014; Dalton 2004; DiGrazia

2014; Kaase 1999), as are higher levels of perceived political efficacy (Corcoran et al. 2015) and trust in others (Almond and Verba 1963; Kaase 1999). However, as political values, efficacy and trust are tightly coupled with actors’ location within the broader social structure and vary by class

and gender (Lamprianou 2012; Laurison 2016), examining the independent effects of these factors is crucial.

Contextual-Level Factors

Studies based on large, cross-national surveys show that higher levels of political activism are more prevalent in wealthy countries that have a long history of democracy (Dalton et al. 2009;

Jenkins et al. 2008; Peffley and Rohrschneider 2003). The mechanisms driving the relationship between national wealth and non-institutional engagement are diverse and sometimes under- theorised. One possibility is that wealthy countries provide citizens with more opportunities for certain kinds of non-institutional activities, such as consumer-based activism (Koos 2012).

Boycotting consumer goods, for instance, is difficult in countries where access to basic commodities is limited. Another possibility is that national wealth has no independent effect, instead conditioning the development of post-materialist values that encourage higher rates of protest and other forms of non-institutional activism (Inglehart 1997).

The political structure of the state also matters. Because democratic institutions stress the active engagement of citizens in politics, people living in democratic countries may enjoy more political opportunities to participate in both institutional and non-institutional activism (Dalton et al. 2009). However, while level of democracy may produce political opportunities for some forms of engagement, it may be less important of irrelevant for others (Meyer and Minkoff, 2004). For instance, government repression may discourage citizens from expressing their opinions in the media while simultaneously provoking demonstrations as citizens begin to voice their grievances in large, public forums. Moreover, the objective existence of democratic systems may have no effect on political engagement if the average citizen does not perceive these systems as truly

democratic. For this reason, it is crucial to separate the effects of institutional structure from the ecological effects of beliefs that citizens hold about their state on a cultural level (Welzel and

Deutsch 2011).

Data and Methods

The 2014 ISSP contains representative samples of individuals living in 34 countries. The analysis relies on data from 33,767 respondents across 33 countries1. Respondents were asked to comment on a variety of topics including the perceived trustworthiness and democratic or non- democratic nature of their state, a substantial number of socio-demographic questions, and questions relating to their level of political and civic engagement. The survey contains data on eight non-institutional political engagement items (contacting the media; contacting politicians or civil servants; expressing political views on the Internet; donating money or raising funds for a political or social cause; boycotting certain products; signing petitions; attending political meetings or rallies; and attending demonstrations) and two institutional engagement measures (voting and political party membership).

Factor Analysis

In order to identify latent repertoires of non-institutional engagement, a factor analysis was performed on the ten political engagement items included in the ISSP data. Because of the non- continuous nature of response options, all variables were dichotomised (have done/have not done).

Standard methods for performing factor analysis use a Pearson correlation matrix and assume that

1 This chapter uses complete case analysis of respondents with valid responses on all predictors and outcomes. Hungary was excluded because of missing data on key variables.

the variables are continuous and follow a normal distribution. Because the variables in this analysis are dichotomous, the factor analysis was estimated based on a polychoric correlation matrix using non-orthogonal promax rotation. Polychoric correlation matrices produce more accurate results than Pearson correlations for ordinal or categorical variables in both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis and can be interpreted in the same way as standard factor analysis results (Holgado-

Tello et al. 2010).

Hierarchical Generalised Linear Models

To examine the effects of individual and contextual-level factors on the odds of engaging in different forms of non-institutional activism, I estimated a series of two-level logistic models using hierarchical generalised linear modelling (HGLM). The factors uncovered in the factor analysis are used as the dependent variables. Hierarchical models are particularly suitable for this analysis because they capture the effects of variables at both the individual and country level.

Four HGLM models were estimated: one for overall non-institutional engagement and one model each for communicative, individualised and collective repertoires. All models were constructed using dichotomous outcomes and the same predictors to facilitate comparison of associations across models. Intraclass correlation coefficients calculated for each of the ANOVA models show that the proportion of variance in political engagement that is accounted for by country-level differences varies across all four models: overall=0.208; individualised=0.238; collective=0.116; and communicative=0.106. These findings tell us that between 10.6% and 23.8% of differences in non-institutional engagement are due to country differences, thus justifying the use of a mixed model. Furthermore, likelihood ratio tests for each model (p<0.001) support the

use of a hierarchical structure over a simpler logistic regression design. Following the specification of the models, robustness tests were performed2.

Independent variables

At the individual level, I test the effects of socio-demographic and value-based measures on the odds of participation in different forms of engagement. The socio-demographic measures include gender, age, family income in seven categories3, years of education, and membership in voluntary organisations as a proxy measure for social capital4 (four-point scale measuring level of participation in church/religious organisations, sports groups, business or professional organisations and other voluntary organisations).

The models also include an index of democratic values (α = 0.79) capturing the degree to which an individual agrees that (1) all citizens have a right to an adequate standard of living, (2) governments should respect the rights of minorities and (3) treat everyone in society equally regardless of their social position, (4) politicians should take into account the views of citizens before making decisions and (5) people should be given more opportunities to participate in public

2 An identical analysis was performed on the 2004 wave of the ISSP survey on citizenship with no significant difference in results. A test of multicollinearity was performed using the variation inflation factor (VIF). All scores were well below the acceptable threshold (Hair et al. 2014) with the exception of age and age squared, as age was used to construct the age squared variable. Model fit was assessed by comparing Bayesian information criterion (BIC) of consecutive models. 3 In the ISSP family income is reported in the domestic currency of the respondent’s country in unstandardised categories. Separating income into seven categories was the best option to retain all countries in the analysis while allowing for cross-country comparison. 4 A true measure of networks was not included in the ISSP survey. Following convention in the literature, voluntary organisation membership was used as a proxy measure for social capital (Son and Lin 2007; Lee and Bartkowski 2004; Rosenfeld et al. 2001).

decision-making. Also included in the models are measures of trust in government, trust in others, and personal political efficacy5.

At the country level, the models test the effects of national wealth (GDP PPP per capita), a country-average measure of citizens’ perception of the health of their democracy (1=poor,

10=good) and Freedom House scores (1=free, 7=not free) as an objective measure of the strength of each country’s democratic institutions.

Findings

Identifying Repertoires of Non-Institutional Engagement

The results of the factor analysis (Table 1) reveal three distinct repertoires (factors) of non- institutional engagement encompassing: 1) contacting the media, contacting politicians or civil servants, and expressing political views on the Internet; 2) donating money or raising funds for a political or social cause, boycotting certain products, and signing petitions; and 3) attending political meetings or rallies, and attending demonstrations. These three repertoires of non- institutional activism are distinct from a fourth category of institutional engagement made up of voting and political party membership (factor 4). Each of the eight non-institutional engagement variables loaded cleanly on only one factor with all items loading strongly (above 0.5) except for attending political meeting and rallies (factor 3) which loaded at 0.4596.

5 Level-1 variables were rescaled by centering responses around the average for the respondent’s country. Group-mean centering improves the interpretability of results in multi-level models because it disentangles the within-group effects of a variable from the between-group effects. For instance, it separates the effects on activism of being more educated than the average citizen in one’s country from the between-group effects of overall differences in levels of education across countries. Because level-1 group-mean centered variables are uncorrelated with level-2 predictors it becomes possible to comment on their independent effects (Aguinis et al. 2013; Bell et al. 2018). 6 Robustness tests were performed to ensure the internal consistency of these factors (results available upon request). First, the same factor analysis was performed on the 2004 wave of the ISSP which contains samples from different countries. The results confirm the structure of non-institutional engagement

The results of this factor analysis point to important variations in how people interact with and communicate their political demands to institutional elites and other citizens.

Table 1: Results for the Factor Analysis on Political Engagement Items

Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 3 Factor 4

Contacting the media 0.722

Contacting politicians or civil servants 0.556

Expressing political view on the Internet 0.568

Signing petitions 0.709

Boycotting certain products 0.696

Donating money or raising funds for a 0.501 political or social cause

Attending political meetings or rallies 0.459

Attending demonstrations 0.560

Voting 0.455

Political party membership 0.471

Note: Factor analysis estimated based on polychoric correlation matrix and using non-orthogonal promax rotation. Only factor loadings > 0.4 are shown.

Factors 1 and 2 contrast activities where the actor personally communicates their demands to other people or institutions (factor 1) and activities where demands are communicated more

repertoires presented in this chapter. Second, the structure of these repertoires was replicated identically or with slight variation in individual countries within the 2014 data. Finally, regression analyses were also performed with and without the inclusion of the lowest loading item on factor 3 (attending political meetings and rallies). The results of these analyses remained nearly identical, so this variable was retained in the factor and in the analyses.

informally, through changes in lifestyle, monetary support of social and political causes, or expression of generalised agreement or dissatisfaction (factor 2). This interpretation is supported by Teorell et al.’s (2007) distinction between voice- and exit-based political strategies.

Activities that require direct communication and contact with others are unique in so far as they require the expression of personal or community-based demands by individuals through the exercise of “voice” (Teorell et al. 2007; Beeghley 1986). Because of the importance of communication for the success of these strategies, factor 1 is defined as a communicative repertoire of activism. In contrast, the activities making up factor 2 do not require the exercise of voice.

Rather than sending a personalised message, participants “cast a vote” for or against a politicised issue or object by signing petitions, donating money or boycotting certain products (Teorell et al.

2007). Researchers have highlighted the sporadic, informal and individualised nature of these forms of engagement by contrasting them with participation in hierarchical, interest aggregating organisations such as political parties and social movements (Inglehart and Catterberg 2002;

Micheletti, 2002; Stolle et al. 2005). These activities allow the actor to engage politically through daily, personal lifestyle choices and position taking (Micheletti 2002). Petition signing, boycotting and donating money therefore constitute an individualised repertoire of activism

(Micheletti 2002).

In addition to the distinction between communicative, voice-based strategies and individualised, exit-based strategies, the results of the factor analysis reflect different aspects of collective political participation. Factors 2 and 3 differentiate activities where the actor comes into direct physical contact with other activists (factor 3) and activities that are performed by the individual in private and potentially anonymously. These findings also support previous literature

that identifies consumer and protest politics as distinct modes of non-institutional activism (Ekman and Amna 2012; Norris et al. 2005; Teorell et al. 2007).

Demonstrations and rallies (factor 3) are activities where the activist comes into face-to- face contact with other people. Because the success of these strategies is often a product of the number of participants the event attracts, they share some similarities with the exit-based strategies outlined by Teorell et al. (2007). However, demonstrations and rallies also allow activists to express their own political demands and facilitate the opportunity to address large crowds of people. The collective face-to face nature of these activities therefore set these strategies apart from individualised activism which highlights the role of the activist as a critical consumer and can be performed privately or anonymously. To reflect the collective, face-to-face nature of these activities I refer to protests and political meetings and rallies as parts of a collective repertoire of activism.

Communicative, individualised and collective repertoires reflect three distinct dimensions of non-institutional activism. Independent variables typically used to predict levels of non- institutional engagement likely operate differently for each of these repertoires. Moreover, levels of engagement in these repertoires varies significantly across countries (Table 2). Assessing the individual- and contextual-level factors associated with these differences is central to understanding the relative inclusivity of different repertoires of activism.

Table 2: Participation in Non-Institutional Political Engagement Repertoires by Country, in Percent

Country Any Engagement Individualised Collective Communicative Turkey 27.6 20.7 14.2 11.9 Russia 28.2 20.8 12.9 11.7 Poland 38.0 32.6 12.2 11.0 Philippines 47.3 24.4 31.9 26.9 South Africa 49.7 32.3 37.4 19.5 Israel 55.3 46.1 35.8 24.5 Korea 56.3 53.9 15.6 11.3 Slovenia 57.6 50.2 26.1 20.3 Japan 57.8 55.3 14.4 8.6 Chile 58.0 45.4 27.4 26.5 Lithuania 61.5 47.3 30.6 16.5 Georgia 62.4 35.2 43.9 27.2 Taiwan 66.8 58.5 25.9 22.7 Slovak Republic 68.6 61.6 35.5 29.1 Croatia 69.1 65.5 18.3 17.0 Venezuela 69.1 50.0 46.0 26.2 Czech Republic 71.1 61.4 43.4 27.1 India 77.4 58.4 62.0 46.4 Spain 79.9 66.5 57.4 30.4 Finland 81.5 75.9 34.4 42.1 United States 82.4 77.5 37.6 47.6 Great Britain 82.5 79.3 24.5 39.7 Netherlands 83.0 76.5 44.2 38.4 Switzerland 86.3 83.2 31.1 32.4 Norway 86.3 79.5 50.0 41.9 Germany 86.9 83.5 47.1 35.7 Austria 88.1 84.6 36.6 41.6 Belgium 88.4 84.3 49.6 36.6 France 89.2 85.1 58.6 28.8 Sweden 89.7 87.6 38.5 37.8 Iceland 90.0 87.1 48.8 39.0 Denmark 90.3 86.3 50.9 39.3 Australia 92.1 90.3 34.9 49.9

Overall Participation in Non-Institutional Engagement

Before discussing the effects of focal variables on communicative, individualised and collective repertoires of non-institutional engagement, I examine a model that combines all

measures of non-institutional engagement into an overall activism outcome. This model serves as a baseline for speaking to the literature and highlights the importance of disaggregating non- institutional engagement into distinct forms of participation.

Table 3: Results for the HGLM (Logistic) Model on Overall Non-Institutional Activism

Odds Ratio B S.E. e(B) Gender (Female=1) 0.039 0.028 1.039

Income 0.035*** 0.008 1.036

Age 0.029*** 0.004 1.029

Education 0.071*** 0.004 1.074 Voluntary Organisation 1.090*** 0.026 2.974 Membership Trust in Government -0.038** 0.013 0.962

Efficacy 0.098*** 0.012 1.102

Trust in Others 0.087*** 0.019 1.091

Democratic Values 0.108*** 0.015 1.114

GDP PPP PC 0.016 0.013 1.016 Perception of Democracy 0.387* 0.157 1.473 (Country-level) Freedom House Score -0.327* 0.130 0.721

Constant -1.497 0.857

N 33767

BIC 33004.36

Notes: ***p ≤ 0.001, **p ≤ 0.01, *p ≤ 0.05. Controlling for age-squared to account for tapering of engagement rates at the highest age categories.

The results for the overall non-institutional engagement model (Table 3) support what has generally been reported in the literature. The finding that men and women do not differ

significantly in their odds of engaging in non-institutional participation is in line with conclusions that this form of engagement is more inclusive of women. However, measures of personal resources, including income, education and voluntary organisation membership all have significant and positive effects on non-institutional activism. These results corroborate findings which suggest that, despite being more democratic in some respects, non-institutional engagement remains more accessible to the wealthy, educated and well networked. Moreover, while rates of engagement in non-institutional activism may have increased over time, more people report having participated in institutional engagement (n=25,914) than non-institutional activism (n=23,537).

The negative effect of trust in government on overall non-institutional engagement also supports the idea that individuals who distrust the state are more likely to engage in political participation occurring outside of traditional avenues. However, higher levels of trust in others, democratic values and political efficacy associate with political engagement positively. These results corroborate previous findings that people who engage in non-institutional activism are more likely to value altruism, egalitarian ideals and critical citizenship norms (Dalton 2004, 2008;

Inglehart and Catterberg 2002; Marien et al. 2010; Norris 2007).

Finally, at the contextual level, strong democratic institutions, and a broader cultural belief in the strength of a country`s democracy are positively associated with non-institutional activism, supporting the literature which associates political freedom with higher levels of political engagement. In contrast, national wealth has no significant effect on overall non-institutional engagement.

The activities included in the overall non-institutional engagement model, however, represent qualitatively different forms of participation. Disaggregating non-institutional activism

reveals key differences in the effects of individual and contextual-level predictors on different repertoires of engagement.

Disaggregating Non-Institutional Activism

If the inclusivity of non-institutional engagement is defined only in terms of the absolute number of people who participate, individualised activism would appear to be the most inclusive.

Individualised engagement was practiced by the largest number of respondents (n=20,687) followed by collective activism (n=12,099) and communicative engagement (n=9,785). However, disaggregating the overall non-institutional engagement measure (Table 4) reveals how participation in these forms of activism is differentially stratified by socio-economic factors including gender and income.

Women are more likely than men to participate in individualised forms of engagement such as signing petitions, boycotting products and donating money but less likely to engage in collective and communicative activism. Holding all other variables in the model at their mean, men have a

64.5% predicted probability of engaging in individualised activism whereas women have a 68.8% predicted probability. These results support previous findings that women, who are disproportionately responsible for work related to the private sphere, are more likely than men to engage in private sphere lifestyle-politics – activities that give political meaning to daily routines

(Haydu 2014; Hunter et al. 2004; Mariene et al. 2010).

Table 4: Results for the HGLM (Logistic) Models on Different Repertoires of Activism

Individualised Activism Collective Activism Communicative Activism Odds Ratio Odds Ratio Odds Ratio B S.E. B S.E. B S.E. e(B) e(B) e(B) Gender (Female=1) 0.194*** 0.027 1.214 -0.248*** 0.025 0.780 -0.307*** 0.026 0.735

Income 0.056*** 0.007 1.057 -0.027*** 0.007 0.973 0.005 0.007 1.005

Age 0.035*** 0.004 1.035 0.026*** 0.004 1.026 0.003 0.005 1.003

Education 0.071*** 0.004 1.074 0.063*** 0.004 1.065 0.063*** 0.004 1.065 Voluntary Organisation 0.933*** 0.024 2.542 0.809*** 0.021 2.245 0.839*** 0.021 2.314 Membership Trust in Government -0.049*** 0.013 0.952 -0.034** 0.012 0.967 -0.077*** 0.013 0.926

Efficacy 0.088*** 0.011 1.092 0.125*** 0.010 1.133 0.110*** 0.011 1.116

Trust in Others 0.126*** 0.018 1.135 0.095*** 0.018 1.100 0.064*** 0.019 1.066

Democratic Values 0.116*** 0.015 1.123 0.115*** 0.015 1.122 0.055*** 0.015 1.056

GDP PPP PC 0.032** 0.012 1.032 -0.010 0.013 0.990 -0.006 0.010 0.994 Perception of Democracy 0.281 0.145 1.324 0.223 0.156 1.250 0.404*** 0.119 1.498 (Country-level) Freedom House Score -0.338** 0.121 0.713 -0.164 0.130 0.849 -0.184 0.099 0.832

Constant -1.802* 0.792 -1.609 0.851 -3.262*** 0.647

N 33767 33767 33767

BIC 35139.03 38556.17 35825.53

Notes: ***p ≤ 0.001, **p ≤ 0.01, *p ≤ 0.05. All models controlling for age-squared to account for tapering of engagement rates at the highest age categories.

On the other hand, structural constraints including gender-based harassment online

(Mantilla 2015; Megarry 2014) and disadvantage in terms of broader, gender-based social expectations (De Piccoli and Rollero 2010) may contribute to the underrepresentation of women in collective and communicative engagement. Holding all other variables constant at their means, men have a 36.1% predicted probability of engaging in collective engagement as compared to a

30.6% for women. This gender disparity is also reflected in communicative engagement, with men having a 29.4% predicted probability of engagement compared to 23.5% for women. Age is non- significant for communicative engagement suggesting that this form of participation is more inclusive of all age groups.

Disaggregating non-institutional engagement also reveals key differences in the effects of economic and social resources. The literature suggests that people with higher income, dense social networks and more formal education tend to be more politically active. These findings have traditionally been used to temper the argument that non-institutional activism is less stratified by socio-economic inequality than institutional engagement. In accordance with previous findings, education is positive and significant for all three forms of non-institutional engagement while voluntary organisation membership is the strongest individual-level predictor of activism across all models. Unlike financial capital, networks formed in voluntary organisations are not resources that need to be expended in order to engage in a specific form of participation (such as donating money). Rather, networks facilitate activism by linking the individual to diverse groups of people, increasing the chance that this individual will find out about a social movement campaign and be asked to participate (Teorell 2003). Integration within broader social networks also promotes norms of reciprocity and trust that in turn promote political engagement (Lee and

Bartkowski 2004; Rosenfeld et al. 2001). However, because these models control for trust in others

and democratic values, the strong effects of voluntary organisation membership highlight the independent importance of networks for activism.

In contrast to voluntary organisations membership which promotes participation in all forms of non-institutional engagement, the effects of income differ significantly across models.

Household income has no significant association with communicative engagement, a positive and significant association with individualised engagement and a negative and significant association with collective engagement. Holding all other variables in the model at their mean, people with the highest levels of family income have a 71.0% predicted probability of engaging in individualised activism as compared to 62.8% for people in the lowest category of family income.

The positive relationship between income and individualised activism is important but not surprising. Donating money to political causes and engaging in boycotts requires financial resources. These forms of engagement are therefore more likely to attract people with higher incomes7.

On the other hand, the relationship between family income and collective engagement is negative and significant. Respondents with the lowest levels of family income have a 35.2% predicted probability of participating in demonstrations and rallies compared to a 31.2% predicted probability for respondents with the highest levels of income. Because this model also controls for the effects of many covariates that may explain or confound the relationship between income and political engagement (including gender, age, education, voluntary organisation membership and

7 Non-linear relationships between income and political engagement were also tested for and were non- significant. To ensure that the positive relationship between income and individualised activism was not driven solely by donating money, as a robustness test another model excluding donating money was estimated and the results did not differ significantly.

efficacy), this statistically significant relationship points to an important independent association between income and engagement in collective activism.

The divergent effects of family income on these two forms of engagement highlight the diverse ways that economic class is associated with political activism. In the case of individualised engagement, income serves as a resource that must be deployed as a requirement for participation in boycotts or donations. In contrast, engagement in collective activism is relatively inexpensive.

In this case, the negative relationship between income and engagement may be less a product of the direct exclusion of upper-class people from collective activism and more related to the cultural homology between economic class and specific repertoires of engagement (Laurison 2006;

Sommer Harrits 2013). Collective activism has historically been a means – sometimes the only means – for less advantaged citizens to express grievances and demands. However, more research on the cultural mechanisms of class-based inequality in political engagement is needed to specify the mechanisms driving this association.

Theories of political engagement posit that in addition to being less stratified by traditional markers of privilege, non-institutional engagement also attracts people with strong political efficacy, social trust and more egalitarian worldviews (Dalton 2008; Inglehart and

Catterberg 2002). Across all three models, stronger feelings of efficacy and democratic values have a positive and significant relationship with engagement. As in the overall non-institutional model, trust in government is negative and significant while trust in others is positive and significant across all three disaggregated models. Dalton (2008) argues that people who mistrust political institutions are more likely to engage in direct, elite-challenging non-institutional activism. Trust in others and higher levels of personal efficacy facilitate this engagement (Kaase

1999). Importantly, because these models control for structural factors that promote trust and

democratic values (including voluntary organisation membership and higher income), the findings support previous literature on the independent effects of values and beliefs in predicting non- institutional engagement (Dalton et al. 2009; Inglehart and Catterberg 2002; Stolle et al. 2005;

Straughn and Andriot 2011).

Differences in non-institutional engagement are also conditioned by national context.

Higher rates of individualised activism are associated with national wealth and the objective presence of strong democratic institutions. On the other hand, perceptions of the health of a country’s democracy at the cultural level has no significant association with individualised activism. This finding speaks to the importance of objective structures for creating the political opportunities necessary for individualised activism. Engagement in boycotts and political donations is more prevalent in countries with developed markets because consumers in these contexts have the luxury of choosing among different commodity items based on their political beliefs. Political engagement through consumption may also resonate more strongly from a cultural standpoint in countries with robust capitalist economies. Moreover, because democratic states stress the active engagement of citizens across social domains, these governments may be more responsive to demands made through informal channels or indirectly though broader changes in the lifestyles and choices of its citizens.

On the other hand, national wealth is not significantly associated with communicative engagement because this repertoire does not rely on the presence of robust commodity markets.

At the contextual level, the most important factor for communicative engagement is an internalised culture of belief in the strength of a country’s democratic institutions. People are more likely to personally communicate political demands if they live in a country where the state is understood by the broader population to be democratic and responsive to the demands of citizens. In the case

of communicative engagement, this cultural belief is more important than the objective character of institutions.

Interestingly, although engagement in collective activism varies significantly across national contexts, the contextual variables included in these models do not explain these differences. More research is needed to specify why collective engagement is more prevalent in some countries than in others.

Discussion and Conclusion

Some scholars have suggested that growing rates of non-institutional engagement may remedy historic patterns of socio-economic stratification in political participation. This chapter has argued against a monolithic definition of non-institutional activism by showing how different forms of non-institutional engagement are influenced by different forms of inequality.

Individualised engagement allows people to participate politically as part of their daily routines. Because women are disproportionately responsible for daily domestic labour, they are more likely than men to engage in individualised activism. At the same time, women are less likely than men to engage in more public and perhaps riskier collective and communicative participation where gendered cultural expectations about the role of women in politics may lead to the devaluation of their voice. Women’s overrepresentation in individualised engagement and underrepresentation in collective and communicative activism is obscured when these three forms of participation are collapsed into a single measure – as shown by the non-significant relationship of gender in the overall engagement model.

Although collective engagement is stratified by gender, people with lower household incomes are more likely to engage in collective participation than people with higher household

incomes. One does not need to enjoy abundant economic resources to participate in protests or rallies, and demonstrations have long been a valuable avenue for economically marginalised groups to express demands. This trend reverses for resource intensive individualised activism, with people from higher income households being more likely to engage.

Differences in country-level resources also translate into differences in political engagement. As with individual-level inequalities, the particularities of national contexts create opportunities for engagement in some forms of activities. National wealth may be associated with increased individualised engagement because people living in wealthy countries have more economic and structural opportunities to engage in lifestyle-based activities such as boycotting, donating money and signing petitions. On the other hand, engaging in communicative activism is more likely if the respondent lives in a county with a widespread cultural belief in the strength of democratic institutions.

In light of the importance of context in explaining differences in activism, future research would benefit from a more thorough analysis of the potential moderating effects of context on the relationship between individual-level predictors and activism. Unfortunately, such an analysis is beyond the scope of this chapter. This chapter has, however, shown the importance of a more nuanced approach to the study of non-institutional engagement. Examining non-institutional activism at the level of repertoires allows for a better understanding of the meaning of distinct political activities, while providing a better portrait of the relative inclusivity of different forms of participation.

Appendix

Table A1: Descriptive Statistics for HGLM Models

Mean Std. Dev. Min Max Outcomes Overall non-institutional activism 0.70 0.46 0 1 Individualised activism 0.61 0.49 0 1 Collective activism 0.36 0.48 0 1 Communicative activism 0.29 0.45 0 1

Predictors Gender (Female=1) 0.52 0.50 0 1 Family income 3.88 1.97 1 7 Age 47.93 17.08 18 85 Education 12.55 4.18 0 31 Voluntary organisation membership 1.90 0.72 1 4 Trust in government 2.79 1.09 1 5 Political efficacy 2.84 1.35 1 5 Trust in others 2.35 0.78 1 4 Democratic values 6.10 0.93 1 7 GDP PPP PC 34.86 15.08 5.68 65.66 Perception of democracy (aggregated 6.69 0.97 4.68 8.60 country means) Freedom House score 1.58 1.06 1 5.5

Chapter 3

Demonstrating in the Internet Age: A Test of Castells’ Theory

Globalised Protest and its Limits

The near-simultaneous eruption of the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, and other uprisings from 2010 to 2012 reinforced the judgment of many observers that social movements had entered a new era. In their view, social movements are increasingly characterised by young, well-educated protesters who are linked by inexpensive digital communications media and aware that they are part of a global movement making claims against transnational political authorities and economic elites (Castells, 2015 [2012]; Della Porta & Mosca, 2005; Fominaya, 2014;

Gerbaudo, 2012; Glasius & Pleyers, 2013; Langman, 2013; Lynch, 2011; Mason, 2013; Smith &

Wiest, 2012; Tejerina, et al. 2013; Tilly & Wood, 2013 [2004]; Van Laer & Van Aelst, 2010).

Other analysts warn against such techno-optimism. They note that, inter alia, digital communications media can be surveilled and controlled by people in positions of authority, thus limiting the Internet’s mobilising potential (Morozov, 2011; Uldam, 2016). They question the ubiquity of digitally enabled protest by highlighting that online engagement continues to be stratified by traditional markers of socio-economic privilege (Van Laer, 2010; Oser, Hooghe &

Marien, 2013). Finally, critics assert that, by attending only to certain types of movements, techno- optimists deflect attention from the degree to which national contexts continue to influence trends in civic engagement (Brym et al., 2014; 2018; Esfandiari, 2010; Farrell, 2012; Fuchs, 2012;

Morozov, 2011; Uldam, 2016; Zhang & Brym, 2019).

I address this debate by measuring the extent to which demonstrators in diverse countries share the characteristics of global protesters. I also examine the degree to which national contexts influence the characteristics of demonstrators and their patterns of civic engagement. To that end,

I first operationalise key aspects of Manuel Castells’ theory of social movement development, one of the most frequently cited and clearly articulated accounts of social movement mobilisation in the 21st century (Castells, 2015 [2012]). I then test his theory using data from the World Values

Survey. I find support for Castells’ contention that use of online media is a significant predictor of protest. However, I also discover that having a sense of global connectedness does not significantly affect one’s likelihood of engaging in demonstrations. Relatedly, engagement in nationally- oriented civil society organisations is one of the strongest predictors of who demonstrates. In addition to having an independent effect on activism, national political and economic contexts moderate how individual-level political and economic grievances affect civic engagement. In short, this chapter suggests the need to revise a key principle of the techno-optimist worldview.

Social Movements in the Internet Age

As late as the 1960s, social movements were often regarded as emotional, spontaneous, and irrational outbursts of discontent (Hannigan, 1985). A decade later, this orientation gave way to a structuralist approach emphasising the availability of political opportunities and access to resources as necessary conditions for movement formation (McAdam, Tarrow & Tilly, 2009).

The study of social movements then experienced a cultural turn characterised by renewed interest in the relationship between emotions, culture, and social movement activism (Brym, 2007;

Brym & Araj, 2006; Castells, 2015 [2012]; Goodwin & Jasper, 2006; Touraine, 2004). According to one current of thought, the growth of global networks channelling the flow of goods and information facilitated a shift from manufacturing to knowledge-based economies and caused contentious politics to become less preoccupied with struggles over the control and distribution of resources and more concerned with making moral or ethical demands (Inglehart, 2018; Touraine,

2004). This reorientation led some scholars to claim that we have entered a new era of global social movements (Castells, 2015 [2012]; Della Porta & Mosca, 2005).

In this new era, online communication technologies are said to promote civic activism in various ways. Techno-optimists argue that digital networks equalise power relations between activists, on the one hand, and state authorities and corporate elites, on the other, by giving activists new tools for distributing ideas and mobilising partisans (Della Porta and Mosca, 2005). As

Manuel Castells (2015 [2012], p. 7) put it, “[m]ass self-communication is based on horizontal networks of interactive communication that, by and large, are difficult to control by governments or corporations.” Digitised networks also supposedly make it possible for people previously excluded from activism to engage in protest by lowering communication and coordination costs

(Shirky, 2008). Insofar as extensive and rapid diffusion of information enables speedy activist mobilisation, it may also influence movement tactics; according to Castells and others, street demonstrations and swarm-like challenges in multiple locations spread by “contagion” and are becoming more frequent (Castells, 2015 [2012], p. 2; Kelly Garrett, 2006). Finally, by enabling rapid and inexpensive coordination between geographically dispersed activists, online communication technologies are often said to lay the groundwork for the development of a global identity, causing activists to see themselves as members of a transnational community composed of people with similar experiences and grievances (Baek et al. 2012; Smith & Wiest, 2012). Again,

Castells (2015 [2012], pp. 250-1) writes that:

Movements are…global, because they are connected throughout the world, they learn from other experiences, and in fact they are often inspired by these experiences to engage in their own mobilization. Furthermore, they keep an ongoing, global debate on the Internet, and sometimes they call for joint, global demonstrations in a network of local spaces in simultaneous time. They express an acute consciousness of the intertwining of issues and problems for humanity at large, and they clearly display a cosmopolitan culture, while being rooted in their

specific identity. They prefigure to some extent the supersession of the current split between local communal identity and global individual networking.

Said differently, it appears to techno-optimists that the relationship between the state and activists is shifting as grievances become less tied to some of the economic and political characteristics of activists’ countries, such as their level of development and the degree to which they provide democratic channels of influence, and more tied to issues that concern all humanity: growing inequality caused by globalisation, attempts of many governments to adopt austerity measures, suppression of human rights, climate change, lack of food security, and so on (Coyne,

2012; Touraine, 2004). From this point of view, even movements that begin as local challenges often frame their grievances cross-nationally. An early example is the Mexican Zapatista movement, which originated in the 1990s as a local rebellion but soon gained support internationally by using the Internet to link local grievances to the broader international struggle against globalisation. More recent instances could easily be multiplied, but the upshot is the contention that cross-national differences in opportunities for engagement are shrinking while globalised protest is expanding (Kelly Garrett, 2006; Van Laer & Van Aelst, 2010).

Criticisms of Techno-Optimism

Earlier several criticisms of the techno-optimist account of social movements in the

Internet age were outlined. I now discuss two main sets of criticisms at greater length.

First, evidence that the Internet promotes and democratises protest is mixed at best

(Haunss, 2015). Unequal access to cell phones and high-speed Internet excludes the most disadvantaged people from involvement in new communications networks and therefore in digitally enabled protest. That is likely one reason why online activism continues to be associated

with traditional markers of socio-economic privilege, including higher levels of education, income, and network connectedness (Van Laer 2010; Oser, Hooghe & Marien, 2013). Moreover, because digital communications media are surveilled and, ultimately, controlled by people in positions of authority, they have been used to thwart progressive activism and even mobilise counter- movements, not just in authoritarian regimes but in liberal democracies (Brym et al., 2018; Uldam,

2016). More subtly but no less importantly, social media are designed to sell user data to businesses so the latter can identify people who have the highest probability of liking and buying particular commodities. The resulting spread and intensification of consumer culture deflects attention from political issues and lowers the level of political engagement of many users (Leistert, 2015). Social media platforms also filter information, favouring content that reinforces users’ political views.

Because these platforms do not fact-check information that circulates online, some news that users encounter is likely to be false or misleading. For instance, it is estimated that more than 27% of

Americans 18 years of age or older visited a “fake news” website in the final weeks of the 2016

American elections (Guess, Nyhan & Reifler, 2018). When users share misinformation in an online network of like-minded individuals, they reinforce opinions that can sway political behaviour.

A second set of criticisms of the techno-optimist account questions whether protest increasingly transcends national contexts. The plain fact is that transnational social movement campaigns continue to cluster in rich, democratic countries. Consider the 15 October 2011 Global

Day of Action, which reportedly mobilised about 2.5 million protesters in 951 cities across 82 countries. This outburst was the Occupy Movement’s zenith. Newspaper accounts place the epicentre of the action in Spain, which accounted for about 1.25 million demonstrators, half the global total. Italian protesters numbered in the hundreds of thousands, Germans and Americans in the tens of thousands. Thereafter, the numbers drop off quickly. Spain’s protesters amounted to

4.1% of the country’s population between the ages of 15 and 64, but Canada’s 15,000 or so demonstrators composed just 0.06% of the corresponding age cohort. One is obliged to conclude that the Global Day of Action was largely a Western European affair with an admixture of North

American participants. Except for Chileans, only scattered groups of people in Latin America, the

Caribbean region, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania took part (15 October… 2018;

Occupy Canada, 2018; World Bank, 2016a). Despite assertions about the increasingly globalised nature of protest, such cross-national differences hint at the possibility that structural factors associated with national context continue to affect protest rates.

I argue that countries are characterised by various cultures of political engagement. Access to online communication may flatten national differences in opportunities for protesting, but not significantly so. Demonstrating is not a viable form of action in all countries. Levels of national wealth, economic inequality, and democracy affect not only citizens’ level of engagement but also the type of activities in which they participate (Dalton, Van Sickle & Weldon, 2009; Stolle,

Hooghe & Micheletti, 2005). Moreover, the process through which individual-level economic and political grievances influence engagement varies across national contexts (Welzel & Deutsch

2012). Notably, economic grievances translate into different political behaviours across diverse political regimes (Anderson, 2000; Uslaner & Brown, 2005; Lancee & Van de Werfhorst, 2012), and the relationship between political opinion and protest is moderated by a country’s economic environment (Dalton, Van Sickle & Weldon, 2009).

In light of these criticisms, it is entirely plausible, as Charles Tilly and Lesley Wood suggest, that (1) a growing absolute number of social movement activists think of themselves as global citizens, develop political programs and strategies that transcend national borders, create international networks and organisations with like-minded people to exchange ideas, offer mutual

aid, and coordinate activities; yet (2) such activists may remain a relatively small proportion of the people who take part in demonstrations and other social movement activities worldwide (Tilly &

Wood, 2013 [2004], p. 95-123). As a result, some of the hypothesised traits associated with globalised protest may have varying effects depending on national context—or no independent effects at all when other factors are controlled.

Therefore, research to date leaves us with a mixed if not confusing picture of the extent to which the attributes of globalised protest apply to contemporary activists in a diverse array of countries. In a recent review of the literature on social movements and information and communication technologies, Cristina Flesher Fominaya and Kevin Gillan (2017, p. 384) emphasise “the need for nuanced accounts of empirical reality to test the veracity of competing visions of digital futures.” This chapter seeks to contribute to the small but growing number of such accounts (Brym, 2019; Dencik & Leister, 2015).

Testing the Extent of Protest Mobilisation

To test the extent to which contemporary protesters share the characteristics of global civic activists, I operationalise aspects of Manuel Castells’ theory (Castells, 2015 [2012]). I focus on

Castells’ theory because it is the most clearly articulated account of social movements in the

Internet age, and Castells is one of the most influential proponents of the global theory of social movement protest. Many social movement analysts draw inspiration from Castells’ work and agree with the thrust of his argument (Bennett, 2003; Bennett, Segerberg & Walker, 2014; Della Porta

& Mosca, 2005; Loader, 2008; Tejerina, Perugorría, Benski & Langman, 2013). I focus on demonstrations rather than other forms of civic participation because Castells regards demonstrations as the hallmark of civic participation in the Internet age.

Hypotheses

Castells identifies four sets of factors that influence the propensity of people to demonstrate in the Internet era (see Figure 1). He claims that people are more likely to take part in demonstrations if they are aggrieved, available, digitally connected, and globally conscious. Let us consider each factor in turn.

Figure 1: Castells’ Theory of Global Protest

Grievances. According to Castells, people express anger when they perceive injustice and identify its source. If certain circumstances (discussed later) allow them to overcome their fear of retribution, they develop enthusiasm and hope for justice (Castells, 2015 [2012], p. 13-14, 222).

These considerations suggest the first hypothesis:

H1: The probability of demonstrating is highest among people with the most intense

grievances.

Availability. People are not randomly distributed with respect to the likelihood that they will perceive injustice, overcome fear, and engage in potentially corrective action. Some categories of the population are more prone to doing so than are others, and they are in that sense relatively available for social movement activities, including demonstrating. According to Castells, the most readily available categories of the population today are young, well-educated people, mainly students and professionals, especially if they are unemployed or underemployed and have strong pre-existing ties to civic organisations. Such ties presumably indicate a relatively high sense of social responsibility and increase the chance that like-minded friends and acquaintances will help pull them into social movement activities (Castells, 2015 [2012], pp. 25, 29, 56-7, 60, 68, 169).

Hence the second hypothesis:

H2: The probability of demonstrating is highest for young, well-educated students,

particularly those who are unemployed, underemployed and have strong pre-existing ties

to civic organisations. (The World Values Survey data do not allow for the testing of the

effects of professional status.)

Digital connectedness. According to Castells, grievances and availability can be transformed into broad-based action only if there exists a communication process that allows people to propagate their sense of injustice, interact with others who feel similarly aggrieved, develop a collective identity, refine their analysis of the causes of and solutions to perceived

injustices, and plan appropriate courses of action. For contemporary social movements, the Internet and wireless communication devices are of signal importance in this regard (Castells, 2015 [2012], pp. 6, 7, 15, 222). The third hypothesis follows:

H3: The probability of demonstrating is highest for people who use the Internet and other

digital media frequently.

Global consciousness. Castells notes that digital connectedness has been growing for decades and that, in tandem, activists in many countries have thickened the social ties that link them. They have also forged a sense of common purpose regarding global economic, political, and environmental issues. Castells emphasises that the maturation of global consciousness contributed to the protest wave that began to swell in December 2010 as the Tunisian uprising inspired its

Egyptian counterpart, and as American activists, encouraged by mass demonstrations in Egypt and

Spain, implemented the originally Canadian idea of occupying Wall Street in 2011 (Castells, 2015

[2012], pp. 55, 161-2). I therefore propose a fourth hypothesis:

H4: The probability of demonstrating is associated with people who identify as world

citizens and is higher in the five-year period beginning in 2010 than in the preceding five-

year period.

Finally, I test a fifth hypothesis assessing the extent to which national context affects protest, either independently or by moderating the relationship between individual-level grievances and engagement. Research suggests that protest rates may be higher in wealthy

democracies than elsewhere (Tilly & Wood (2013 [2004]). Political grievances may be stronger in countries with a relatively high level of economic inequality (Rothstein & Uslaner, 2005), and relatively high inequality may, in turn, promote political conflict (Haggard & Kaufman, 2012). If they live in highly unequal countries, people who are distrustful of their government may be more likely to protest than are others. Stronger democratic institutions may increase the rate of protest for people who enjoy more access to resources than others do (Dalton, Van Sickle & Weldon,

2010). Therefore, people with fewer economic grievances may be more likely to protest if they live in a democratic country. Considering such possibilities, I propose the final hypothesis:

H5: The probability of protesting varies by country, and country-level economic and

political characteristics moderate the relationship between individual-level grievances and

engagement.

Methods

Data Source, Dependent Variable, Sample

To test these hypotheses, I draw on data from waves 5 and 6 of the World Values Survey

(2017b; hereafter, WVS). The WVS has polled nationally representative samples of respondents in scores of countries between 1981 and 2014. Its six waves coincide with the latest and, according to many analysts, most far-reaching period of globalisation in world history (Albrow, 1997). The last two waves were selected for analysis because they were fielded in 2005-09 and 2010-14, the period when the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, and other uprisings germinated and blossomed, solidifying the view in the minds of many analysts that globalised social movements had come of age.

WVS data do not tap the globalisation of social movements at the organisational level.

Therefore, information on the location, size, social composition, claims, and targets of each movement organisation or the type and density of inter-movement ties is not available. However,

WVS data do capture the effects of factors linked to globalised activism on protest. Because the

WVS collects data on many nationally representative samples of individuals, it offers an advantage over chronicles of individual movements and studies of the evolution of ties between social movement organisations: it allows the testing of the hypothesis that protesters conform to the presumed attributes of globalised demonstrators.

In particular, the WVS asks respondents whether they had ever taken part in a demonstration (World Values Survey, 2017c):

I’m going to read out some forms of political action that people can take, and I’d like you to tell me, for each one, whether you have done any of these things, whether you might do it or would never under any circumstances do it.

Attending peaceful demonstrations (response options: have done, might do, would never do).

This questionnaire item serves as the dependent variable in the analysis. Because of the non- continuous nature of the response options, I recoded the dependent variable as a dichotomy (have done/have not done) and use mixed-effect logistic modelling. Many forms of political contestation other than demonstrating exist, ranging from rioting to making political jokes. Unfortunately, the

WVS contains data on only a small number of types of political engagement, none of which capture activities that are relatively private. Aside from demonstrating, the other activity types (notably voting and striking) included in the WVS do not factor prominently in Castells’ theory. In any case, because Castells focuses on demonstrations, it is necessary to follow suit in order to test his theory.

I restricted the sample to respondents from the 25 countries that participated in the last two waves of the WVS (2005-09 and 2010-14) and answered all questions pertaining to the variables included in the model. The countries in the sample are Australia, Brazil, Chile, Cyprus, Georgia,

Germany, Ghana, India, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Poland, Romania,

Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, the

United States, and Uruguay. These countries vary widely in extent of protest and rate of Internet and email use (see Table 1).

According to the standard UN classification, thirteen of these countries are high-income, seven are upper-middle income, five are lower-middle income, and none is low-income (United

Nations 2014, p. 148). Freedom House classifies eighteen of these countries as free, six as partly free, and one as not free (Freedom House, 2017, pp. 20-4).8 Generalisations are thus constrained by the skew of the sample toward richer democracies, but they are nonetheless based on considerable variation in key predictors.

8 Freedom House, the organisation that releases the Freedom House index, is an NGO funded by the American government. The ranking emphasises free and fair elections, limited government, individual rights, civil liberties, and other aspects of political liberalism. Other indexes have different biases. For example, the Democracy Index published annually by The Economist emphasises free and fair elections, voter security, the influence of foreign powers on governments, and the ability of the civil service to implement policies. While I acknowledge the biases underlying such rankings, it should be noted that country rankings produced by different indexes do not differ greatly.

Table 1: Percent Ever Demonstrated and Email/Internet Use by Country

Demonstrated Email/Internet Use Country No Yes No Yes Spain 68.69 31.31 66.03 33.97 Germany 73.94 26.06 44.88 55.12 Sweden 74.20 25.80 21.48 78.52 Cyprus 74.32 25.68 55.80 44.20 Georgia 78.20 21.80 70.69 29.31 India 78.58 21.42 73.90 26.10 Chile 79.82 20.18 54.17 45.83 Australia 80.98 19.02 38.34 61.66 Brazil 82.62 17.38 63.42 36.58 Uruguay 84.01 15.99 72.39 27.61 Trinidad and Tobago 85.21 14.79 74.15 25.85 Ukraine 85.26 14.74 74.07 25.93 United States 85.67 14.33 27.35 72.65 Morocco 86.29 13.71 73.47 26.53 Mexico 87.18 12.82 72.44 27.56 South Africa 88.74 11.26 77.16 22.84 Slovenia 89.36 10.64 56.59 43.41 South Korea 89.48 10.52 31.40 68.60 Poland 90.89 9.11 59.41 40.59 Romania 92.23 7.77 74.98 25.02 Japan 93.50 6.50 46.30 53.70 Ghana 93.54 6.46 81.37 18.63 Turkey 94.58 5.42 65.36 34.64 Thailand 94.78 5.22 79.93 20.07 Malaysia 97.52 2.48 59.90 40.10

Because I use a mixed model, weights were applied in two stages. First, each country was weighted by known national population characteristics (age, gender, and so on). Second, each country sample was weighted to represent 1/25 of the total sample. The effective sample size after cleaning the data is 54,255 respondents for the 25 countries across waves 5 and 6.

Model and Independent Variables

To test the hypotheses, I estimated a hierarchical generalised linear model (HGLM). The mixed model approach was adopted to examine the effects of individual and country-level variables on the odds of demonstrating and assess how the effects of individual-level predictors vary by country.

The logistic mixed model was constructed in four steps. First, I estimated a one-way

ANOVA model testing for significant variation in the odds of demonstrating across countries. I then estimated a crossover effect model examining the effects of country-level variables on country-level variation in demonstrating. Next, a random coefficient model was estimated to test for cross-country effects of focal, individual-level predictors. Finally, I estimated a full model to examine the combined effects of level-1 (individual) and level-2 (country) predictors. A second version of the full model was estimated to test for cross-level interactions. Model fit was assessed by comparing the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) of consecutive models, with smaller BIC values indicating better model fit. Due to space limitations, output for the first three steps is not reproduced here but is available on request.

Based on Castells’ theory, five categories of independent variables were included in the model. I began with two dummy variables measuring trust in government and major companies.

They reflect Castells’ conceptualisation of grievances as crises of trust in political and financial institutions. Response options are 0=“do not trust” and 1=“trust.” In addition, a 10-point scale of personal economic satisfaction was included. Response options range from 1=“completely dissatisfied” to 10=“completely satisfied.”

Second, I added a series of sociodemographic measures to assess the effects of structural availability. These variables include gender as a dummy variable (0=male, 1=female); age in years;

education (highest degree attained) in five categories; standardised income recoded in quintiles (as a control); employment status, represented by three dummy variables (part-time work, unemployed, and student), with full time work as the reference category; and a measure of participation in civic society organisations measured as a 17-point scale capturing participation in eight types of civic associations: church or religious; sports or recreational; art, music or educational; labour; political party; environmental; professional; charitable or humanitarian; and other. For each type of organisation, response options were 0=“not a member”, 1=“inactive member,” and 2=“active member.”

According to Castells, the development of social movements is facilitated by communication using online technologies. To examine this claim, I included variables measuring the use of email and the Internet for access to news. The WVS asks respondents if, to obtain information on what is going on in their country and around the world, they use email or the

Internet daily, weekly, monthly, less than monthly, or never. These variables were combined and coded as a dummy variable measuring whether respondents use email or the Internet to access such information at least weekly (0=“no,” 1=“at least weekly”).

For Castells, increased global consciousness is an engine for the development of social movements and increased rates of protest. To capture global consciousness, a world citizenship dummy variable was created. It is based on a question asking whether respondents see themselves as a world citizen (0=“no,” 1=“yes”).

To control for the effects of historical change between wave 5 and wave 6, I included a dummy variable, coded as 0=wave 5, 1=wave 6.

Finally, I included a series of country-level variables because, as noted earlier, there is good reason to expect that country-level effects are present. These variables were used to assess

the independent effects of contextual variables on the odds of demonstrating, and their moderating effects on individual-level predictors and protest.

Based on the claim that social movement campaigns tend to cluster in rich countries (Tilly

& Wood, 2013 [2004]), I included each country’s gross domestic product per capita at purchasing power parity (GDP PC PPP) in the model (World Bank, 2016b). This variable measures the effect of a country’s wealth on the odds of participating in peaceful demonstrations. I also included three measures of country-level political and economic structure: (1) Political freedom is based on

Freedom House scores, which range from 1 to 7, with higher scores representing lower levels of freedom. The scores are based on country experts’ assessments of each country’s state of civil liberties and political rights (Freedom House 2017). (2) Perception of democracy is calculated using WVS country means for respondents’ perceptions of how democratically their country is governed, ranging from 0=“not at all democratic” to 10=“completely democratic.” (3) Country- level income inequality is measured using Gini coefficients (Central Intelligence Agency, 2011).

Finally, because I am interested in the degree to which countries’ political and economic structures moderate the effects of individual-level economic and political grievances on demonstrating, I test two cross-level interactions. Following Anderson (2000) and Dalton, Van

Sickle and Weldon (2010), the first interaction—between individual-level economic satisfaction and country-level perception of democracy—measures the extent to which political context moderates the effect of economic grievances on demonstrating. The second interaction—between individual-level political trust and the Gini index—measures the extent to which economic inequality in the respondent’s country moderates the effect of political grievances on demonstrating (Rothstein & Uslaner, 2005).9

9 Although trust in government and financial satisfaction at the individual level were not significant in Model 1, significant country-level variance in these variables was identified in the random coefficients

Castells (2015 [2012], p. 250) admits that “movements are local and global at the same time,” but while he notes the existence of unique social and historical conditions that shape certain features of social protest in each country, he is chiefly interested in identifying the forces that operate universally to elicit protest in the Internet era. He thus neglects to explain cross-country variation in aspects of demonstrating, focusing instead on its common sources and characteristics.

If such universal forces predominate, we would expect the effects of the focal variables to be roughly the same from one country to the next. In that case, there should be no significant cross- level interactions indicating that country-level variables modify the effects of individual-level predictors on the odds of participating in demonstrations. We would also expect country-level predictors to be non-significant after controlling for individual-level variables.

Findings

Table 2 presents the results from the logistic mixed models. Although the findings partly support some of the hypotheses, they also suggest the need to qualify Castells’ argument in many respects.

model. This finding suggests that the effect of these variables varies by country. To specify the cross- country variance in these measures of individual-level grievances, I tested for cross-level interactions.

Table 2: Logistic Mixed Model for Demonstrating, WVS Waves 5 and 6

Model 1 Model 2 e(B) e(B) B S.E B S.E Variable Odds Ratio Odds Ratio Trust in government -0.083 0.086 0.920 -0.949*** 0.164 0.387 Trust in companies -0.207** 0.073 0.813 -0.212** 0.073 0.809 Economic satisfaction -0.019 0.012 0.981 0.187** 0.068 1.206 Female -0.219*** 0.040 0.803 -0.220*** 0.040 0.803 Age 0.012*** 0.003 1.012 0.012*** 0.003 1.012 Education 0.238*** 0.025 1.269 0.238*** 0.025 1.269 Income 0.001 0.021 1.001 0.001 0.021 1.001 Part-time work 0.090 0.058 1.095 0.089 0.057 1.093 Unemployed -0.110 0.056 0.896 -0.109 0.056 0.896 Student 0.137 0.107 1.147 0.130 0.107 1.138 Civic participation 0.124*** 0.012 1.132 0.124*** 0.012 1.132 Email/internet use 0.445*** 0.045 1.560 0.446*** 0.045 1.563 World citizenship 0.105 0.058 1.111 0.105 0.058 1.111 Wave 6 -0.283*** 0.074 0.754 -0.282*** 0.074 0.754 GDP (PPP) per capita 0.006 0.011 1.006 0.008 0.012 1.008 Freedom House -0.342* 0.145 0.710 -0.333* 0.143 0.717 Gini index 0.007 0.020 1.007 0.023 0.016 1.023 Perception of -0.238 0.187 0.788 -0.331 0.175 0.718 democracy Trust in government * 0.023*** 0.004 1.024 Gini index Economic satisfaction * Perception of -0.033** 0.011 0.967 democracy Constant -0.203 1.565 -0.261 1.247 n 54255 54255 AIC 41890.19 41872.92 BIC 41920.66 41905.83

* p ≤ 0.05; ** p ≤ 0.01; *** p ≤ 0.001

Hypothesis 1 suggests that respondents with a relatively high level of grievance are more

likely to participate in demonstrations than are respondents with a relatively low level of grievance.

As shown in Model 2, after controlling for contextual-level variables and cross-level interactions, trusting corporations decreases the odds of protesting by a factor of 0.809. This finding is in line with what Castells leads us to expect. However, the relationships between political and economic grievance and protest are moderated by national context. As shown in Model 1, individual-level economic satisfaction and trust in government at first appear to have no significant effect on demonstrating10. However, as suggested by the results in Model 2, which include interactions, these non-significant relationships are a product of the different ways in which individual-level grievances translate into activism in different political and economic regimes.

10 Preliminary analyses revealed contextual-level variation in the relationship between economic satisfaction and protest. To specify this variation, an interaction effect between economic satisfaction and contextual-level perception of democracy was included in Model 2. The interaction effect was significant, suggesting that cross-national variation in the effects of economic grievances across diverse contexts was confounding the relationship between grievances and protest in Model 1 where the coefficient was non-significant. Once the interaction effect was included, the main effect of economic grievances became positive and significant in Model 2.

Figure 2: Predicted Probability of Demonstrating in Low, Medium and High Inequality Contexts by Trust in Government

In Model 2, the main effect of trust in government is negative, suggesting that people who trust their government are less likely to protest. However, as the positive interaction between trust in government and the Gini index in Model 2 suggests, when these respondents live in a country with a high level of income inequality, their odds of protesting increase. Figure 2 illustrates this interaction by plotting the predicted probabilities of demonstrating in countries with low, medium, and high levels of income inequality for people who trust their government versus those who do not, holding all other variables at their mean. In countries with low levels of income inequality, people who do not trust their government have a higher probability of demonstrating than those

who do. However, in highly unequal countries, this relationship reverses, with respondents who are trustful of government having a higher probability of demonstrating.

Without further testing, it is only possible to speculate as to the mechanism responsible for this interaction. It is plausible that, as Castells claims, people who trust the state are less likely to protest because they have a relatively low level of political grievance and therefore tend to believe that the state acts in the interests of the entire polity. However, when faced with a high level of income inequality, this trust may be shaken, thus increasing the odds that people who are otherwise trustful of state institutions will demand reform by participating in demonstrations. These findings suggest that political grievances might be a necessary but insufficient condition for protest because the relationship between political grievance and demonstrating is context-dependent.

The effect of economic grievance also departs from what Castells leads us to expect.

Castells asserts that economic grievances increase the probability of demonstrating. In contrast,

Model 2 shows that, net of other factors, people who are economically satisfied are more likely to protest than people who are not economically satisfied and that the effect of economic satisfaction on protest varies by country.

Figure 3 plots the predicted probability of demonstrating across levels of democracy for people with low, medium, and high economic satisfaction, holding all other variables at their mean.

When economically satisfied people live in less democratic countries, they have a higher probability of demonstrating than moderately satisfied and dissatisfied people. In contrast, in highly democratic countries, the most dissatisfied people have the highest probability of demonstrating.

Figure 3: Predicted Probability of Demonstrating in Contexts with Low, Medium and High Perceived Democracy by Level of Economic Satisfaction

Castells assumes that collective action occurs “outside the prescribed institutional channels” (Castells, 2015 [2012], p. 246). However, the findings highlight the complex ways in which individual-level resources and grievances intersect with country-level political opportunities to produce protest. In undemocratic countries, where channels of communication between citizens and the state are minimal, people from disadvantaged economic backgrounds may lack the resources needed to engage in demonstrations and believe that the system is biased against them (Uslaner & Brown, 2005). In this case, higher levels of individual-level economic resources may mitigate the costs associated with public demonstrations and give participants the confidence to engage. In contrast, in highly democratic countries, citizens know that viable options

other than demonstrating exist for relaying their concerns to governing elites. These alternatives may include contacting a member of parliament, donating money to an opposition party, and so on. Such strategies are most accessible to the well-to-do (Uslaner & Brown, 2005; Lancee & Van de Werfhorst, 2012). In these contexts, a low level of economic satisfaction produces grievances that trigger protest by citizens who, by virtue of their class position, may be excluded from other avenues of civic engagement. However, because of the overrepresentation of liberal democracies in the sample, it is possible that this finding is an artefact of the countries included in the analysis.

Research is required to assess this relationship in a greater diversity of national contexts.

Turning now to the second hypothesis, recall that, according to Castells, net of grievances only some people are likely to be available for demonstrating. In his view, young, well-educated, unemployed, or underemployed people with strong links to civil society organisations are most likely to be available for demonstrating in the Internet era. With respect to these socio-economic predictors, again the findings offer some support for Castells’ theory, several important specifications, and some contradictory evidence.

Education and civic engagement are positively and significantly associated with attending demonstrations, as Castells leads us to expect. As Model 2 shows, each unit increase in education increases the odds of protesting by 26.9%, while each unit increase on the civic engagement scale increases the odds of protesting by 13.2%.

However, other availability factors in the model do not behave as Castells leads us to expect. Castells makes much of the involvement of women in the Arab Spring in Egypt. However, in the sample, being female decreases the odds of protest by a factor of 0.803. During the Arab

Spring, gender had a similar effect in Egypt (Brym et al., 2014). Moreover, none of the employment status variables singled out by Castells is significant, suggesting that position in the

labour market has no bearing on demonstrating. The relationship between age and protest is significant but positive, not negative, as Castells claims. In terms of availability measures, then,

Castells’ picture of a young, well-educated, well-connected but unemployed or underemployed student activist is only partly supported by the data. According to the results in Model 2, protesters are more likely to be older, well-educated men who are well networked within national or local civic society organisations. Other research on post-2009 anti-austerity movements in various

European countries also finds social profiles of protesters that are inconsistent with the expectations of globalisation theorists like Castells. These findings suggest that significant variation over time and between countries exists in the social characteristics of people who demonstrate (Accornero & Ramos Pinto, 2015; Karyotis & Rüdig, 2017; Rüdig & Karyotis, 2013;

Peterson, Wahlström & Wennerhag, 2015).

The findings are consistent with Castells’ contention that the use of digital communications media increases the likelihood of demonstrating, perhaps by linking otherwise disconnected citizens and allowing them to exchange ideas, appreciate their collective capabilities, and plan joint political action (hypothesis 3). Unfortunately, the data do not allow me to say whether respondents who frequently use digital communications media tend to be affected in exactly these ways or to specify the mechanisms through which online communication encourages protest among users. Furthermore, although using email and the Internet for news at least once a week is positively and significantly associated with protest, the magnitude of this effect is not large.

Holding all other variables at their mean, people who use email and the Internet have a 15.9% predicted probability of demonstrating, while people who do not use email or the Internet have a

10.8% predicted probability of demonstrating.

With respect to hypothesis 4, Castells holds that an important cultural change that facilitates demonstrating has occurred in recent decades—a growing sense of global citizenship, defined as “an acute consciousness of the intertwining of issues and problems for humanity at large” (Castells, 2015 [2012], p. 251). In his view, global consciousness has diffused over time, and the potential for demonstrating has grown as more people come to think of themselves as global citizens with mutual interests and common responsibilities to all of humanity. The results are inconsistent with the existence of a link between global citizenship and demonstrating; the association between these variables in Model 2 is not significant, net of other predictors. Together with the strong positive effect of voluntary organisation membership in the models, these findings suggest that engagement with national and local organisations is more important for protest mobilisation than having a sense of global citizenship. These findings highlight the importance of face-to-face communication (rather than abstract membership in online communities) for promoting activism (Min Baek, Wojcieszak & Delli Carpini, 2011; Putnam, 1995). What is more, the data show that the prevalence of demonstrating decreased between 2005-09 and 2010-14.

Respondents in wave 6 of the World Value Survey had 0.754 times the odds of demonstrating as compared to respondents in wave 5 when controlling for other predictors in the model.

In addition to testing Castells’ four conditions for political mobilisation, I also examine the effects of structural variables at the contextual level to see how country-level differences independently contribute to protest or moderate the effects of individual-level predictors

(hypothesis 5). Although Castells hints at the fact that broader structural factors, such as growing inequality, may contribute to individual-level grievances and therefore protest, he nevertheless contends that social movements and their associated demonstrations exhibit “striking similarities” across diverse cultural and institutional contexts (Castells, 2015 [2012], p. 45). This claim is

investigated by examining the independent and moderating effects of contextual-level factors. The independent effects of the level-2 variables included in the models explain 29.8 percent of the variation in demonstrating across countries.

The first notable finding relates to the effect of political freedom, which independently influences protest, but not in the way Castells hypothesised. The negative effect of political freedom in Model 2 suggests that individuals in more repressive regimes are less likely to demonstrate, net of other predictors in the model. Living in a more repressive regime may reduce the odds of protest because citizens are relatively fearful of their government and/or less hopeful that political action will result in social change.

Contextual-level factors also moderate the effect of individual-level grievances on demonstrating. A high level of economic inequality increases the odds that people who otherwise trust their government will protest. Perceived level of democracy also moderates the relationship between grievances and political engagement. Living in a country that is perceived to be relatively democratic reduces the odds that an economically satisfied person will engage in protest.

Discussion and Conclusion

The results suggest that, while some characteristics of the globalised activist portrayed by

Castells and others apply to the demonstrators in the sample, other characteristics are not significant, do not affect protesting in the expected direction, or are moderated by national context.

Specifically, students and people who are unemployed, underemployed, relatively young, and globally conscious are not especially inclined to demonstrate. The respondents most likely to demonstrate are well-educated men who get their news from email or the Internet at least once a week, have strong ties to civic associations, and lack trust in corporations. The literature on political participation in the Internet age is generally optimistic about the ability of Internet

communication technologies to democratise and expand protest, but I find that protesting continues to be positively and significantly associated with several traditional markers of social privilege, thus calling into question the Internet’s ability to eliminate social barriers to civic participation.

The findings also call into question the Internet’s ability to flatten cross-national differences in protest. I find that national context has independent and moderating effects on engagement. Contrary to Castells’ claim, people who live in repressive regimes are less likely to take part in demonstrations. People who are otherwise trustful of their government are more likely to protest when living in a context of high economic inequality. Living in a country that is perceived as highly democratic reduces the odds of protesting among people with relatively high levels of economic satisfaction.

I also find that identifying oneself as a global citizen does not significantly affect the odds of protesting. Engagement in local, face-to-face civic society organisations appears to be more important for movement mobilisation than the weak ties formed through online networks (Van

Laer, 2010). Moreover, despite claims that the Internet allows protest to spread by contagion, I find that global rates of demonstrating decreased between the two waves of the WVS examined in this chapter.

I conclude that while some demonstrators share the characteristics identified by Castells, their prevalence does not warrant the claim that they predominate in the Internet age or, as Castells puts it, that they and their networks form “the social movements characteristic of…the Internet

Age” (Castells, 2015 [2012], p. x). The evidence presented is more consistent with the view that many types of social movements and many types of demonstrators coexist. No one type predominates and none is therefore entitled to have an entire age of protest named after it.

Study Limitations and Future Research

This chapter tests the extent to which contemporary protesters share the characteristics of globalised activists. I find that some individual-level characteristics of demonstrators operate as

Castells expects. Others do not. Moreover, the findings align with those of researchers who, unlike

Castells, emphasise that demonstrating is part of a broader repertoire of contention, the structure of which varies by country (Erkman & Amna, 2012; Fourcade et al., 2016; Teorell et al., 2007).

A full examination of how national political opportunities and individual-level characteristics translate into cross-national differences in political action repertoires is a priority for future research. However, it lies beyond the scope of the present analysis. Moreover, I acknowledge the limitations of the methods used in this chapter. While the data employed are nationally representative, meaning that the sample used to estimate the effects of independent variables on demonstrating mirror the known population characteristics of the countries included in the analysis, WVS sampling and weighting procedures do not account for response bias, especially for items where response options connote high or low social desirability. This issue is exacerbated by cross-national differences in the cultural meaning that may be attributed to certain questions by respondents (Fourcade et al., 2016). I acknowledge these limitations and stress that the findings presented here should be read in light of them. To fully understand the mechanisms at work, quantitative work likes ours needs to be augmented by qualitative research, especially in- depth, country-specific case studies of protest and social movements.

Chapter 4

Cultures of Engagement: A New Approach to Explaining Variation in Political Action Repertoires

Political engagement is one major way in which citizens connect with their state and community. The form that this engagement takes is reflective of the broader political and cultural context with which the actor interacts and, therefore, patterns of political engagement vary considerably across countries.

Political sociologists who work to explain cross-national differences in political engagement typically start by delineating forms of political practices based on ascribed characteristics such as risk and cost (Uslaner and Brown 2005; Corcoran et al. 2015), proximity to formal governmental institutions (Stolle and Hooghe 2011) or by combining diverse forms of participation into an overall scale of political engagement (Dalton, Van Sickle and Weldon 2010).

The resulting typologies or scales are then imposed on national or cross-national data and levels of engagement are predicted with standard individual and contextual level variables.

Unfortunately, a focus on identifying categories of political practices and then predicting engagement has resulted in a literature that is largely insensitive to the importance of political culture and to the contextually driven nature of political action. To address this issue, recent scholarship on political engagement has begun to draw on cultural theories of practice. Rather than devising typologies or scales of engagement that are imposed on the data, these studies use an inductive approach to understanding political participation and argue that political engagement is better understood as practice rooted in skills, habits and political styles that align with national history and political structure (Crossley 2003; Fourcade, Lande and Schofer 2016).

However, work in this tradition remains limited. Many of the analyses are theoretical or limited to case studies of single countries, effectively controlling out the effects of political regime and culture. Other scholarship, particularly in the area of social movements, focuses on the activities of organisations rather than on the political behaviour of individual actors (Ramos 2015), which may operate according to different logics. Moreover, despite advances in the field, contemporary studies have thus far failed to address the ways in which political activities can gain meaning from their relational position within actors’ repertoires, and therefore the varied ways in which identical forms of practice can become constitutive parts of qualitatively different repertoires. For instance, demonstrations occur in both democratic and repressive regimes but can carry vastly different meanings and consequences in these two contexts. Finally, without an explicit focus on the relationship between actors’ social and political locations and the enactment of political action repertoires, many studies stop short of uncovering how patterns of action align with broader assemblages of political beliefs, dispositions and culture.

In this chapter, I build on a growing literature linking political activity to work in cultural sociology on repertoires and habitus (Crossley 2003; Fourcade, Lande and Schofer 2016;

Lamprianou 2013). Using results from Latent Class Analyses (LCA) of 32 countries included in the 2014 wave of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) on citizenship, I show that cross- national differences in political engagement cannot be described with pre-determined categories of political action. Rather, the same ten measures of political engagement cluster into diverse political action repertoires within and across countries. The relational structure of political engagement practices within repertoires, rather than the characteristics of the activities themselves best capture cross-national differences in political engagement.

Although countries vary significantly in terms of how their citizens organise political participation in daily life, some similarities are present across countries with comparable political structures and cultures. To further analyse these trends, I estimate an overall LCA model that remains sensitive to how political action can take on different meaning depending on its relational position to other activities within a repertoire. To examine the relationships between repertoires, country context and individuals’ cultural and political dispositions, I perform a Multiple

Correspondence Analysis (MCA) that maps the cultural space of political engagement. The results suggest that political action aligns with broader toolkits of cultural and political dispositions that are not uniformly distributed across countries.

Contemporary Understandings of Political Engagement

The last decade of cross-national research on political participation has been characterised by the conceptual expansion of definitions of political engagement. Activities ranging from protest attendance or voluntary organisation membership to the distribution of memes have been incorporated under the banner of political activism. Debates about what counts as political participation have contributed to the proliferation of scales and typologies meant to describe differences in activity types (van Deth 2014). Scholars working in this tradition begin by grouping together activities that share some objective attribute and then predict engagement by linking participation with resources that facilitate political action or with factors that mitigate the risk or cost of participation. These groupings can generally be categorised under two banners: those that focus on differences in the cost or risk of activities and those that focus on similarity in activity type. In both cases, undue focus on the manifest characteristics of political activities, rather than

on differences in the composition of the political repertoires of real people, abstracts political action from culture and the context of everyday life.

Analysts who view cost or risk as the main attribute delineating different forms of engagement (Back, Teorell and Westholm 2011; Brady Schlozman and Verba 1999; Brady, Verba and Schlozman 1995; Wiltfang and McAdam 1991), proceed from an understanding of the individual activist as a rational actor weighing the potential costs of engagement against expected benefits and their own personal investment in the cause (Corcoran et al. 2015). Engagement in one activity over another is assumed to have measurable associated costs and the deciding factor in participation is whether an actor can afford to engage. Individual-level characteristics, ranging from the respondents’ income to their values and political beliefs are then conceptualised as instrumental resources that can mitigate the cost of engagement (Corcoran et al. 2015).

Like rational choice and resource-based approaches, researchers that focus on similarity in activity type link differences in political engagement to the manifest characteristics of political action. These studies make distinctions, for instance, between Internet-based activism (Gibson and

Cantijoch 2013; Oser et al. 2013), consumption-based engagement (Stolle, Hooghe and Micheletti

2005) and other forms of participation (Ekman and Amna 2012; Sabucedo and Arce 1991; Teorell et al. 2007) and argue that certain individual-level skills, resources and beliefs align with the specific characteristics or demands of these engagement types.

Both approaches assume that political activities can be defined by objective characteristics that remain stable over time and context and affect how and why an activity is practiced by people.

In reality, the costs and risks associated with political engagement vary over time and context.

Moreover, just because two activities share some objective characteristic does not mean that they

coexist in the political action repertoires of real people, especially when we consider political engagement in diverse countries.

Political sociologists observe correctly that engagement in politics is stratified by class and social location. However, this is not simply because some activities are more costly or require resources or knowledge that is more available to some populations. Social location, in addition to being correlated with resources, reflects differences in people’s position in social structure and therefore their relationship to politics (Laurison 2016; Harrits 2013; Bruch and Soss 2018). The relationship between social location and political engagement cannot be explained by resources alone because actors do not choose activities based solely on their innate characteristics. Rather, the decision to engage in one activity over another – or to engage at all – depends on an actor’s general sense of affinity or comfort with certain political practices which itself is a product of social learning in specific political and material environments.

Undue focus on identifying types of political engagement and predicting participation based on standard individual- and contextual-level variables – such as individual resources or national wealth – precludes a deeper understanding of political participation as situated in context and influenced by culture. Different forms of political activism are not abstract activities. They are situationally and contextually rooted forms of practice (Tilly 2006). Connecting the study of political engagement to theories from cultural sociology presents an opportunity to embed political action in individual experience imbued with culture.

Political Engagement as Cultural Practice

Scholars who apply cultural theories of practice to the study of political engagement have begun to address some of the limitations of current approaches in political sociology. Doing away

with the assumption that particular forms of engagement can be differentiated based on attribute similarity, studies in this tradition posit that like all forms of cultural action, political engagement is associated with skills, habits or styles that actors develop as a product of daily interactions with the social world.

Practice theorists argue that recurrent experiences in distinct institutional and material environments contribute to the development of durable embodied dispositions, skills and cognitive schemas that direct action (Bourdieu 1984; Lizardo and Strand 2010). These dispositions exist at the level of practical, embodied knowledge rather than discursive consciousness. Contrary to rational choice explanations, actors do not engage in particular forms of political participation because they have reasoned out the costs and benefits of one form of action as compared to another.

Rather, distinct patterns of political engagement can be observed because actors who are similarly positioned within social and institutional contexts develop similar cultural skills and preferences that align with some forms of action rather than others. Understanding political action therefore requires “looking for systematicity at the level of practice” (Lizardo and Strand 2010: 213, emphasis added) rather than assumed similarity in types of action.

In practice theory, the relationship between culture and action is understood in terms of relationality. Cultural objects and actions only become meaningful in relation to broader, contextually defined and internally consistent systems of beliefs, embodied dispositions and cognitive schemas. Cerulo (1988: 319) gives the example of music to clarify the concept of relational meaning. She writes that by itself, the note “Middle C” has no significance to a listener.

Unless the listener possesses perfect pitch, this note, sounded alone, would likely be indistinguishable from any other note. Only when the listener hears “Middle C” in the context of

a melody or in a musical scale does this pitch take on meaning as part of a march, a hymn or a waltz, evoking different emotions in the listener.

This relational or structural meaning is different from the subjective meaning that actors sometimes attribute to their behaviour. Cognitive limitations prohibit people from coherently outlining the symbolic meaning of action. As a result, practice theory studies cultural meaning by focusing on patterns of difference in packages of action, skills and dispositions embedded in specific contexts (Mohr 1998). The subjective, internal world of actors which includes emotions, discourses and values is important, but is itself structured by broader cognitive schemas of affinity and aversion, similarity and difference, and self and other that are embodied in practice (Jasper

1997; Polletta and Lee 2006; Polletta 1999).

Adopting a relational, practice theory approach to the study of political engagement has three important implications. First, because political dispositions develop as the product of actors’ experiences interacting with their material environment, researchers cannot develop categories of engagement a priori and then apply them to their data. Rather, the study of political engagement must proceed inductively. Sociologists should look for patterns of political engagement in specific contexts and then situate those patterns within broader political and social structures.

Second, because action only becomes meaningful in relation to broader political dispositions, skills and action contexts, the same form of political engagement may be incorporated into the repertoires of actors embedded in very different social structures and whose enactment of the activity is qualitatively different. Bourdieu draws on examples as varied as gift-giving (1990:

105) and participation in sports (1978) to show that the same practice can hold different meanings for different segments of a population or for groups that follow different cultural schemas.

Similarly, a particular form of political engagement, such as protesting, can be practiced by high-

status individuals who have the cultural resources to choose to engage in protest among other political activities and by those for whom taking to the streets is the only conceivable option. While members of both groups can engage in the same form of practice, the location that this activity occupies within their repertoire and the role it plays in each actor’s broader political life is very different. These differences can only be understood by locating action within a broader political habitus (Crossley 2003).

Finally, political engagement cannot be decoupled from the context in which dispositions and preferences develop. Once the forms of practice making up a repertoire are identified, they must be reconnected with the cultural and institutional context being investigated (Mohr 1998).

Practice theory highlights that culture and institutional structure are tightly coupled and mutually reinforcing. People who occupy similar social locations overlap in their daily experiences and interpretations of the political situation in their country. These shared experiences contribute to the development of similar and contextually appropriate embodied cultural dispositions. Likewise, at the cross-national level, countries whose populations share similar political action repertoires and hold compatible political orientations and world views can usefully be understood as having comparable political cultures. The varying structure of these groupings differentiates political regimes and clusters of individuals and can help researchers identify national political cultures and link them to patterns of political engagement. This type of analysis differs from standard quantitative modelling approaches which aim to predict a pre-specified form of participation with variables meant to capture social location and beliefs about the state.

Because practice theory allows scholars to investigate patterns of political engagement without making a priori assumptions about the nature of these patterns, some aspects of this approach, notably Bourdieu’s work, have been gaining traction in the social movement literature.

Movement organisations can be understood as actors who hold particular relational positions within a field or arena (Jasper 2006; Hilgartner and Bosk 1988; Ramos 2015). Different positions in a field are associated with different resources, capital and power structures that contribute to the development of sets of dispositions that guide ways of acting and interacting (DeLay 2008). A movement’s relational position to other actors within a field informs the collective identity that participants develop and enact through social performances and rituals (Melucci 1995; Alexander

2004) as well as the relative power that a movement might have in relation to other actors (Jasper

2006; Rohlinger 2007).

However, most of the social movement literature focuses on the analysis of organisations, which, as noted by Ramos (2015), may behave differently from other types of actors, including individuals. For instance, organisations often operate based on established codified standards and are extremely sensitive to economic and market pressures (Rohlinger 2007). In contrast, individual political actors operate based on unwritten and often unconscious sets of beliefs and dispositions.

Moreover, organisations are susceptible to the process of isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell

1983). Although social movements can innovate their tactics, as organisations compete for power and attempt to mitigate economic uncertainty within defined meso-level fields, successful tactics, frames or organisational structures developed by one movement often spill over and become adopted by other social movements (Meyer and Whittier 1994). The political activities of individuals are less guided by this kind of rational, market-based logic and therefore, the process by which they make choices about appropriate forms of political engagement likely differ as well.

More broadly, the application of practice theory in political sociology and social movements remains underdeveloped. Much of the work is theoretical or focused on single social movement case studies (Crossley 2003; Laurison 2016; Lamprianou 2013) which rely on a narrow

application of Bourdieu’s theory. For example, Shoshan (2018) ties the centralised leadership of

Israeli social movements to a militaristic habitus developed by activists during mandatory army service. Lee et al. (2010) argue that previous political engagement allowed Malaysian civil society actors to develop dispositions conducive to continued political mobilisation. These and other case studies successfully link observable behaviour to actors’ habitus, but not to broader systems of dispositions that differ among social actors. Such an approach runs the risk of indiscriminately attributing any observable political behaviour to the habitus, ultimately reducing the concept’s analytical potential. Studying political engagement through the lens of practice theory is most effective when the analysis is both relational and comparative. Uncovering systems of action and meaning and contrasting these systems to oppositional structures of action and beliefs allows researchers to build up explanations of social action.

One notable advancement in the application of practice theory to study of individual-level political behaviour is Fourcade, Lande and Schofer’s (2016) cross-national comparison of political engagement practices. The authors use Multiple Correspondence Analysis to map country differences in the prevalence of specific forms of engagement. The authors find that countries vary in the volume of civic participation in which their citizens engage, as well as in the degree to which this engagement is episodic (engaging in occupations, demonstrations and strikes) or continuous and focused on membership activities (boycotts and volunteering). By engaging in cross-national comparison, the authors are able to outline systematic differences in practices cross-nationally and link these differences to national history.

However, by focusing on the prevalence of specific practices rather than on the varying relationships between different forms of engagement within and between countries, Fourcade et al.’s (2016) findings summarise cross-national differences in the popularity of certain forms of

action rather than differences in political action repertoires. The authors usefully show that French activists engage in more episodic activism (such as demonstrations) than Americans, who tend to be more active in voluntary organisations and other forms of continuous and membership-based activities. However, not examined is the fact that demonstrating and volunteering are engagement strategies that are available and utilised in both contexts. In each country, differentially situated actors combine these and other activities into diverse political action repertoires. Examining differences in the associational structure of particular forms of action across countries, not simply in the prevalence of distinct activities, allows us to best capture cross-national variation in political participation.

Analytical Strategy for Measuring Relational Meaning Structures

Applying a relational, practice theory approach to the study of political engagement involves identifying systematic groupings of political practices and situating those groupings within broader systems of preferences, skills and dispositions that are more or less available in specific national contexts. To do this, I follow Mohr’s (1998) recommendations for measuring relational meaning structures.

First, I identify the main patterns of relationships between different forms of engagement within countries. If political activities cluster together according to the same attributes consistently across countries, this would lend support to the idea that political practices share innate characteristics such as cost or risk and that these considerations are the driving mechanism behind differences in engagement. Conversely, political practices may cluster into repertoires based on their cooccurrence with other activities practiced by actors. A within country analysis is necessary to identify the principles by which different forms of activities become grouped into political

action repertoires and inoculates us from assuming that one repertoire structure can be universally applied to diverse national contexts.

The next step is to identify some deeper, simpler and more interpretable structural logic that accounts for the range of repertoires that describe engagement trends across countries (Mohr 1998). Unless the structure of political repertoires is identical in all national contexts, per-country analyses will reveal a staggering amount of diversity in how individuals organise their political action. However, countries with comparable political cultures may share similarities in how their citizens engage. This stage of the analysis therefore seeks to identify cross- national patterns of similarity and difference among country specific repertoires of engagement.

Finally, it is necessary to recontextualise political engagement within boarder systems of preferences, skills and dispositions that characterise distinct national political cultures. This is accomplished by mapping the association between repertoires of engagement, context and measures of political and cultural dispositions that tap how people understand their relationship to the state and other citizens.

Data and Methods

This chapter draws on data from the 2014 wave of the ISSP survey on citizenship. The survey contains representative samples of 34 countries, 32 of which are included in this analysis11.

Respondents taking the survey were asked if they had ever engaged in ten forms of political activity. Specifically, whether they had ever signed a petition; boycotted or deliberately bought certain products for political, ethical or environmental reasons; took part in a demonstration; attended a political meeting or rally; contacted or attempted to contact a politician or civil servant

11 Because of missing data on key variables, Great Britain and Hungary were excluded from the analysis.

to express their views; donated money or raised funds for a social or political activity; contacted or appeared in the media to express their views; expressed political views on the Internet; discussed politics when getting together with friends, relatives or fellow workers; and tried to persuade friends, relatives or fellow workers to share their views when they hold a strong opinion about politics12.

To identify the main patterns of relationships between different forms of engagement within countries I perform Latent Class Analysis (LCA) on the ten political engagement items in each country. LCA is an ideal method for capturing nuances in repertoire composition. This method groups respondents in unique classes based on their probability of having engaged in distinct configurations of political activities. The same activity can form part of multiple classes.

The resulting classes are internally consistent and distinct from other classes identified by the procedure. Respondents included in a class share a similar engagement repertoire.

To determine the number of unique political engagement repertoires in each country, a series of LCA models, each adding one class stepwise, was estimated and goodness of fit statistics were analysed for each national sample. Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) of consecutive models were then compared, with smaller BIC values indicating better model fit (Nylund,

Asparouhov and Muthen 2007). In cases where consecutive models yielded marginal differences in BIC values, the composition of models with comparable fit was analysed to determine if adding more classes resulted in meaningful nuances. When it did not, the simpler model was retained.

12 Response options for the first eight measures are: 1) Have done it in the past year; 2) Have done it in the more distant past; 3) Have not done it but might do it; and 4) Have not done it and would never do it. The response options for the last two measures are four-point scales measuring frequency (often, sometimes, rarely, never). Because of the non-continuous nature of response options, and to allow the use of LCA, each of the first eight measures was dichotomised to capture whether a participant had ever engaged in a specific form of political action. For the last two measures, dichotomisation contrasted “often/sometimes” and “rarely/never.”

Once a decision was made about the optimal number of classes, conditional probabilities estimating the likelihood that members of a given class engage in specific activities were examined. To determine which political participation measures would be retained in a class, a threshold of 0.5 (50 percent) was used for each item’s conditional probability of class membership.

This threshold was taken as strong evidence that the associated form of engagement was a constitutive part of a latent group’s repertoire.

Countries’ internal repertoire structures were then compared for similarities and differences. Cases where two or more countries shared identical or similar repertoires were recorded as were cross-national similarities in in the number of repertoire and the diversity of items within. Particular attention was paid to cases where the same activity made up a part of two or more repertoires and how the inclusion of these activities varied cross-nationally.

I then fit an overall LCA model on the entire sample (32 countries) which summarises the general trends uncovered in the by-country LCAs. The online political engagement measure was excluded from the overall LCA model because it did not perform in a consistent manner across countries, frequently not loading on any of the classes. The inconsistent results associated with online engagement suggest substantial cross-national variation in the ways in which this relatively new form of engagement is incorporated into political action repertoires. The overall LCA model therefore includes only nine engagement items. An eight-class model produced the best model fit statistics and best captured the regional trends and relational structures uncovered in the by-country

LCAs.

Finally, to situate the political action repertoires defined in the overall LCA within the context of political culture, I use Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) with an indicator matrix to map the associations between political engagement classes or repertoires, individual-

level political dispositions, competencies and beliefs about the state and civic society, and national context (country).

MCA has been widely used by culture scholars to visually map associations between multiple categorical variables in two-dimensional space (Bourdieu 1984; Gayo-Cal, Savage and

Warde 2006; Gerteis 1998; Kahma and Toikka 2012; Veenstra 2010). Coordinates are plotted using chi-square distances between any pair of column profiles in a contingency table and the average profile (Greenacre and Blasius 2006). The axes of the resulting map represent underlying data structures that differentiate among categories of the included variables. Points that fall on opposite sides of an axis indicate that the underlying data pattern contrasts these elements.

Analysing the categories that fall farthest from the origin of each axis allows for the interpretation of the overall data structure. Indicator matrix MCAs plot relationships between individual respondents and their response categories on each variable rather than associations or causal relationships between variables. Therefore, attributes that cluster together in a particular quadrant represent clusters of dispositions shared by respondents that are dissimilar from dispositions shared by respondents in other quadrants. Such mapping allows for the visual representation of the relational space of political culture and political action.

To capture political culture, I use measures tapping respondents’ political competencies and dispositions as well as individual-level perceptions of what is politically possible in the context of one’s country. In contrast to values that capture beliefs about what citizens should do, the variables included in the MCA capture what respondents feel they can or would do in their national context. Measures of respondents’ political knowledge, orientation, prior experience with political engagement and beliefs in their ability to enact social change capture different engagement capabilities, self-confidence and general habits or taste for activism (Bourdieu 1984; Crossley

2003). Also included are measures of respondents’ structural location and country of residence which allow for the dispositional variables to cluster by social and national location. Bourdieu

(1984) shows that different class locations are associated with distinct cultural dispositions and habits. Following this logic, different political dispositions, competencies and orientations should cluster with particular class positions and be associated with specific forms of engagement. The inclusion of a country variable allows the MCA to plot how these relationships relate to distinct national contexts.

The MCA presented below plots the relationships between a variable comprised of the eight classes or repertoires of engagement, as determined by the overall LCA, and 11 analysis variables: (1) a five-category measure of self-reported social class; (2) a three-category measure of education derived from the standardised highest completed education level variable; (3) a dichotomous variable identifying whether the respondent voted in the last general election; (4) a dichotomous variable identifying whether the respondent belongs to a trade union, business or professional association; (5) a five-category variable representing respondents’ political self- placement; (6) a dichotomous variable reflecting respondents’ perception of the likelihood that they could do something to counteract an unjust or harmful law; (7) a three-category measure of political efficacy derived from a variable measuring the respondent’s perception of their influence on what the government does; (8) a dichotomous variable measuring the respondent’s perception of their understanding of important political issues facing their county; (9) a five-category variable measuring the respondent’s perception of how well democracy works in their country; (10) a dichotomous measure of the respondent’s general trust in others derived from a question asking how often others try to take advantage of or be fair to the respondent; and (11) a series of dummy

variables representing each of the 32 countries included in the analysis. Descriptive statistics for the analysis variables are available in Table A1 of the appendix.

Country-Specific Repertoires

The results from the per-country LCAs suggest that attribute similarity does not adequately account for how people organise political engagement activities. The structure of classes does not reflect differences in risk or investment and does not produce groupings based on activity type consistently across countries. Rather, the 10 political engagement items included in the analysis cluster into a varying number of differently composed repertoires in each country.

Across the 32 countries, the LCAs uncovered a total of 50 distinct classes or groupings of political engagement measures. Of these 50 classes, 30 are unique to a country – representing a country-specific repertoire – while the other 20 were common to two or more countries. This level of cross-national diversity in repertoire structure speaks to the varied ways in which identical political activities can be incorporated into different, nationally specific strategies of political action. Space does not permit a full examination of the repertoire structures in all countries.

However, Russia and Denmark serve as illustrative examples. Russia only has three distinct classes of political engagement, one of which is inactive and makes up 51.5% of that country’s sample.

The next most popular repertoire, practiced by 32.8% of the sample, is restricted to private political discussion and debate with family and friends. The last and most diverse repertoire adds petition signing and demonstrating to private discussions and debates. In contrast, Denmark has 5 distinct classes of engagement, the most diverse of which includes all 10 forms of political action.

Denmark’s inactive class is also a lot smaller, comprising 28% of the sample. In Denmark, petitioning and donating money to political and social causes are included in all the repertoires

(except for the inactive class). In other repertoires, these activities also couple with other forms of private sphere political discussion and with more public forms of expression including rally attendance and direct contact with politicians.

Consistent with findings reported by Fourcade et al. (2016), countries vary substantially in terms of the proportion of citizens whose repertoire is defined by a lack of political activity. In

Poland, for example, 61.1% percent of the sample belongs to an inactive class, while in Austria,

France and Iceland a unique class of politically disengaged citizens does not exist. Countries also vary considerably in terms of the diversity of their political repertoires. For instance, Russia has only three distinct classes of engagement while South Korea and India have seven distinct classes.

Despite these differences, important regional patterns emerge. Western European countries tend to have larger proportions of politically active citizens. Citizens of Western European democracies also have more diverse repertoires, integrating legitimised forms of engagement such as contacting politicians with more mobilised and public forms of activism such as demonstrating.

On the other hand, the repertoires of citizens of non-Western democracies and post-Soviet countries are more likely to be limited to public and riskier forms of engagement. In these countries, citizens who are politically engaged participate in rallies and demonstrations but are unlikely to contact politicians or the media. These findings speak to the importance of national institutions and political opportunities in directing the development of individuals’ political engagement repertoires. In Western European countries and developed welfare states, trust in government is high, the risk of political repression is low and channels of communication between the state and citizens are relatively open and trusted (Dalton 2008; 2004). Citizens have the opportunity to express their demands through a variety of channels, including direct communication with state officials and the media. In these contexts, people who choose to attend

political demonstrations may do so as one of the many options available to them. In other contexts, where direct communication with formal channels is not an option either because these institutions are not trusted or because they simply do not exist, demonstrating may be the only way for citizens to express their dissatisfaction (Brown 2016).

Regional similarities can also be observed in terms of countries whose citizens share identical repertoires. In Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden the largest proportion of each country’s sample engages in petition signing, boycotting, donating money, discussing politics with friends and convincing others to share one’s political views. This repertoire includes consumer-based activism and private sphere political interactions but excludes public protest and direct communication with state officials. The prevalence of this repertoire points to the salience of consumer-based activism in these wealthy, developed states. Many western European countries

– notably Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Germany – also share a class of activists who engage in all 10 forms of political participation. While these “omnivorous” activists

(Peterson, 1992) form a minority of the country sample in these six states, their presence here and absence in other contexts speaks to the diversity of political opportunities available in these contexts. In contrast, non-Western democracies share similarities in terms of more limited but also more public and extra-institutional forms of participation.

Cross-National Patterns of Engagement

The lack of consistency in the grouping of political action items points to the importance of examining differences in the relational structure of repertoires rather than focusing on the characteristics of specific activities. However, the diversity of repertoires uncovered in the per- country analyses requires the application of some pattern preserving, reductive techniques to make

these relational patterns more manifest (Mohr 1998). Accordingly, I performed a LCA on the entire

32-country sample, summarised in Table 1. Although this eight-class LCA model does not capture all cross-national variation, the classes serve as ideal types summarising the relational principles that link activities in country specific repertoires and capture the general cross-national and regional trends.

All eight classes overlap to some extent in their composition. However, each activity takes on meaning as a result of its relationship to other forms of participation within a repertoire. The resulting classes can be distinguished along three dimensions. The first is the variety of activities included in an actor’s repertoire. Class 3 represents the most varied repertoire with respondents in this class engaging in all 10 forms of participation. This class can usefully be understood as an omnivorous repertoire of political action (Peterson 1992). In contrast, class 4 represents the repertoire of individuals who do not engage at all (inactive repertoire).

The second dimension summarises the degree to which actors are willing to engage directly with formal institutional channels including the media and elected officials. While class 5 is the second most varied repertoire, it is distinguished from the omnivorous repertoire by the fact that its participants do not engage directly with these formal channels. Class 5 can therefore be viewed as an extra-institutional omnivorous repertoire.

Table 1 - Results of the Overall Latent Class Analysis (All Countries) – Probability of Engaging in Each Form of Political Activity

Extra- Communicative Private Private Sphere Anonymous Collective Omnivorous Inactive Institutional Consumption Engagement Communication Collective Deliberation Omnivorous Class 1 Class 2 Class 3 Class 4 Class 5 Class 6 Class 7 Class 8 (9.35%) (10.21%) (8.07%) (34.40%) (6.58%) (18.82%) (5.33%) (7.24%) Signed a petition 0.811 0.747 0.940 0.892 0.597

Boycotted products 0.705 0.518 0.842 0.735 Took part in a 0.739 0.993 0.511 demonstration Attended a political 0.846 0.583 0.796 0.619 meeting or rally Contacted a 0.890 politician Donated money 0.566 0.848 0.595 Contacted the 0.597 media Discuss politics 0.910 0.884 0.930 0.809 0.800 Persuade others to 0.549 0.688 0.617 0.621 share political views

*Empty cells represent <0.5 (<50%) probability of class membership.

The third dimension summarises the extent to which the activities in an actor’s repertoire require personal, manifest communication with others or can be executed privately or without directly engaging in communication or deliberation with others. Class 2, comprised solely of signing petitions and boycotting products, captures what Teorell et al. (2007) refer to as impersonal, exit-based political strategies characteristic of political consumption practices. By boycotting and singing petitions, participants exit the consumption of certain commodities or ideas while aligning with other oppositional positions. In this way, the actor privately casts a vote for or against a political issue but does not convey a personalised message by communicating with other activists or the targets of the political action. Because of these characteristics, class 2 (petitions and boycotts) represents a private engagement repertoire. This repertoire is distinct from class 1 where members combine private, critical consumption activities with direct political discussion and deliberation with others. Class 1 activism can therefore be understood as a communicative consumption repertoire. In contrast, individuals who limit their engagement to discussing politics with friends, family and co-workers are captured by class 6 which can be characterised as private sphere communication. The communicative dimension also distinguishes class 7 from class 8. In class 7, rally attendance is coupled with demonstrating and signing petitions, both relatively anonymous forms of action insofar as participants do not stand out as individuals when expressing their demands. This class forms an anonymous collective repertoire. In contrast, class 8 couples rallying with discussing politics and convincing others to share one’s political views. Rallies – which can be more or less public – often involve speakers, teach-ins or other forms of collective learning. When this form of engagement is combined with private sphere political communication and debate, it constitutes part of a collective deliberation repertoire.

Mapping Repertoires in the Space of Political Action

As suggested by practice theory (Bourdieu 1984; Lizardo and Strand 2010), people who occupy similar social and structural locations should share distinct sets of political disposition that align with particular repertoires of action. To understand the relationship between culture and political engagement, it is necessary to examine the associational patterns between actors’ social and national locations and the broader schemas and dispositions that guide their action. MCA was used to map the relationship between the eight political action repertoires uncovered in the overall

LCA and respondents’ social location, political dispositions and competencies, and country of residence. As illustrated in Figure 1, the eight classes of political engagement cluster distinctly across the four quadrants of the map.

On the X-axis, classes 1, 2, 3, 5 and 8 are positioned in opposition to classes 4, 6, and 7.

This placement distinguishes repertoires of engagement based on the diversity of activities that each class contains. The repertoires on the right of the map are more diverse than those on the left, with the inactive category (class 4) falling farthest from the omnivorous repertoire (class 3). On the Y-axis, classes 3, 5, 7 and 8 sit in opposition to classes 1, 2 and 4, with class 6 sitting just above the mid-point. Placement on the Y-axis can broadly be understood as a contrast between forms of engagement that require public interaction with others, including politicians, members of the mass media or participants involved in rallies and demonstrations (at the bottom of the map), and those that can be conducted in the privacy of one’s home, such as signing a petition, boycotting products and discussing politics privately with friends (at the top of the map). Class 8, the collective deliberation repertoire, falls farthest from class 2, the private engagement repertoire.

Figure 1 – MCA Results

Figure 1 (continued) - MCA Map Variable and Category Labels

Class LOWER – Lower class L-MID – Lower-middle MIDDLE – Middle class U-MID – Upper middle class class UPPER- Upper class

Education >HS – Less than high HS/VOC – High school/ UNIV – University or school vocational training higher

Voted in last election N-VOTE – Did not vote Y-VOTE – Voted

Union membership N-UNION – Not a Y-UNION – Member of a member of a union or union or professional professional association association

Political orientation LEFT – Left C-LEFT – Centre-left CENTRE – Centre C-RIGHT – Centre right RIGHT – Right

Ability to counter law N-COUNTER – Unable Y-COUNTER – Able to to organise to counter organise to counter unjust unjust law law

Political efficacy L-Effic – Low political M-Effic – Medium H-Effic – High political efficacy political efficacy efficacy

Understanding of politics N-UNDERSTAND – Y-UNDERSTAND – Bad understanding of Good understanding of political issues political issues

Perception of democracy (in country) L-DEMO – Democracy ML-DEMO – Democracy M-DEMO – Democracy MH-DEMO – functions poorly functions somewhat functions moderately Democracy functions poorly well somewhat well H-DEMO – Democracy functions well

Trust in others N-TRUST – Low trust in Y-TRUST – High trust in others others

Country AUS – Australia AUT – Austria BEL – Belgium CHE – Switzerland CHL – Chile CZE – Czech Republic DEU – Germany DNK – Denmark ESP – Spain FIN – Finland FRA – France GEO – Georgia HRV – Croatia ILR – Israel IND – India ISL – Iceland JPN – Japan KOR - South Korea LTU – Lithuania NLD – Netherlands NOR – Norway PHL – Philippines POL – Poland RUS – Russia SVK – Slovak Republic SVN – Slovenia SWE – Sweden TUR – Turkey TWN – Taiwan USA – United States VEN – Venezuela ZAF – South Africa

Beyond these broad distinctions, the full constellation of relationships between repertoires of engagement and analysis variables suggests four distinct groupings of political engagement, each relating to particular sets of cultural dispositions.

The first grouping, made up of the omnivorous (class 3) and extra-institutional omnivorous

(class 5) repertoires, is located in the lower right quadrant. These repertoires are defined by their diversity and are associated with the highest level of economic capital (upper class). This aligns with Peterson’s (1992) description of omnivorous cultural consumption as a high-status practice.

In terms of political dispositions, omnivorous repertoires are associated with high levels of perceived individual efficacy, centre-left political orientation and a good self-reported understanding of important political issues. They are also associated with voting, believing that democracy in one’s country functions well, and that one is able to get together with others to do something about an unjust or harmful law (collective efficacy). Taken together, these results suggest that higher levels of political efficacy, greater cultural and economic resources and the tendency to remain politically informed and engaged reflect cultural dispositions that predispose respondents with more varied repertoires to feel comfortable in different social settings and with diverse forms of political engagement. They are able to attend demonstrations but also have the resources to contact politicians and the media directly. These findings are in line with those reported by culture scholars showing that members of the elite who have access to economic, cultural and social resources are able to develop dispositions and skills that allow them to bridge diverse social settings and forms of action (Bourdieu 1984; Erickson 1996).

A second grouping of repertoires can be found in the upper right region of the map. This cluster is made up of the communicative consumption (class 1) and private engagement (class 2) repertoires. Consistent with the pattern distinguishing between more and less diverse repertoires,

the more limited private engagement repertoire falls farther to the left of the map than does the more varied communicative consumption repertoire. Like the omnivorous grouping, these repertoires are associated with high levels of economic, cultural and political capital, with upper- middle class standing and having a university education clustering with these forms of practice.

Individuals with these repertoires tend to lean to the centre-right of the political spectrum, believe that their democracy functions moderately well and have a high level of social trust. The political repertoires of these respondents stress more individualised and financial forms of engagement such as petition signing and boycotting products. These upper-middle class participants have the financial resources to donate to political causes but not necessarily the social resources to reach out directly to politicians or the media or the inclination to attend demonstrations and rallies.

The countries that cluster closest to the communicative consumption and private engagement repertoires align with the trends identified in the country-level analyses. Classes 1 and

2 reflect the most common repertoires found in Western Europe and North America. At the contextual level, countries clustering in this region of the map enjoy high levels of national wealth

(as measured by GDP per capita) and highly developed consumer goods markets which create the structural opportunities for people to engage in political consumption (Koos 2012). From a cultural standpoint, scholars have linked upper-middle class cultural dispositions, notably in Western

European and Scandinavian countries, to particular forms of political consumption that, in the context of this analysis, cluster in the top right region of the map (Micheletti 2000). Linnet (2011), for example, uses the Danish term hygge to refer to the particular upper-middle class ethos linked to environmentally friendly political consumption and boycotting practices that permeates Danish and, more generally, Scandinavian society (Sheppard 2011). These dispositions favour comfort, mental tranquillity, the local or familiar, and meaningful social interaction over conspicuous

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consumption and loud, boisterous or showy interactions. It is therefore fitting that repertoires of engagement in this portion of the map emphasise participation and communication in the private sphere along with thoughtful consumption over more public and extroverted forms of activism such as demonstrations or rallies.

If the right side of the map is characterised by omnivorous repertoires of engagement and forms of action that stress individualised and consumption-based engagement, the left side is characterised by more limited repertoires (at the top) and those that emphasise public displays of protest (at the bottom). The anonymous collective repertoire (class 7) located in the bottom left region of the map clusters with lower levels of education (less than high-school), lower self- reported class and a comparatively low level of trust in others. These findings align with other studies showing that direct, public and potentially riskier forms of engagement continue to be more accessible to individuals from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds than other forms of activism (DiGrazia 2014). This repertoire is also associated with the belief that the democratic institutions in one’s country do not function well, extreme-left or extreme-right political orientations and low perceived levels of political efficacy. As found by political engagement scholars, relatively low levels of education and access to economic resources, as well as comparatively low levels of social trust and social capital contribute to a decrease in public deliberation (Hauser and Benoit-Barne 2002; Putnam 1995). During protests, participants are co- present with other activists, but directly voicing one’s personal opinions and demands or engaging in discussion, debate and deliberation is often impossible. The dispositions that align with the anonymous collective repertoire – notably low levels of economic, social and political capital – set it apart from the collective deliberation repertoire (class 8) which emphasises the deliberative aspect of collective engagement and falls just to the right of the Y-axis.

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Dispositions and political practices should be situated in the national contexts in which they develop. The countries that cluster in the bottom left region of the map include Georgia,

Turkey, South Africa, the Philippines and India – all non-Western democracies – as well as Spain and Venezuela, which have recently witnessed especially vigorous urban protests. Ever since declaring independence from the Soviet Union, Georgia has experienced political and ethnic tensions, sometimes resulting in violence and Freedom House (2014) classifies Georgia as well as the Philippines, Turkey and Venezuela as not free or partially free. Because of the political climate in these regimes, it is not surprising that citizens who are faced with sometimes unreliable and potentially hostile state institutions are inclined to voice their grievances by taking to the streets.

The fact that collective action in these regions favours public yet anonymous activities and that these strategies are not combined with engagement with formal institutions speaks to the low levels of personal and political trust in these regimes. Lastly, relatively low GDP and comparatively underdeveloped commodity markets which are necessary for political consumption practices

(Koos, 2012) may leave anonymous collective activism as the most viable form of political engagement in these countries.

Finally, the top left portion of the map groups the two least varied repertoires of engagement: the inactive repertoire (class 4) and the private sphere communication repertoire

(class 6). As compared to anonymous collective engagement, these repertoires are associated with somewhat higher socio-economic class (lower-middle/middle) and higher levels of education

(high school/vocational education). In terms of political dispositions, centrist political views, a lack of understanding of important political issues and low levels of collective efficacy correlate with these repertoires. Having not voted in the last general election also clusters with these dispositions, highlighting a more general tendency toward political disengagement. In the absence

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of acute socio-economic grievances and polarising political convictions, and lacking a good understanding of politics and conviction in their ability to organise to enact social change, it is not surprising that these respondents are predisposed to inactivism or to simply discussing politics privately with friends. Although the relationship between grievances and activism is still debated in the literature, grievances are most likely to translate into engagement when they are coupled with strong efficacy and a belief that engaging with others can produce social change (Castells

2015). When such dispositions are not present, as is the case in the top left region of the map, people are less likely to be active. Post-Soviet regimes, which had the highest rates of inactivism in the country-level analyses, are overrepresented in this quadrant.

Discussion and Conclusion

How is culture linked to political action? Imagine two demonstrators, each unhappy with the neo-liberal turn of their state’s fiscal policy. One is an educated upper-class individual with centre-left political values and a strong sense of political efficacy. She is well informed about political issues and convinced that her involvement in the demonstration can make a difference. In addition to attending the demonstration, she may also write to her local representative, donate to an NGO supporting a similar cause, and adjust her buying habits to ensure that they support local small businesses rather large multi-national corporations. In contrast, the second demonstrator did not finish high-school, earns a low salary and feels that people will take advantage of others whenever they can. She lacks confidence that democracy in her country functions well. Although she does not necessarily believe that attending the demonstration will make a difference, she holds strong political convictions (whether left or right leaning). Lacking the resources, connections and know-how to access formal political channels, if these channels are available at all, she attends a

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demonstration to express her grievances. As these examples suggest, the ways in which demonstrating fits into an individual’s broader political toolkit can vary dramatically depending on one’s personal beliefs and dispositions, which are themselves conditioned by structural location within national contexts.

Distinct forms of political participation cannot be meaningfully delineated based on abstract and transposable properties such as risk or cost. This is because the characteristics and meanings associated with each form of engagement vary cross-nationally and across segments of a country’s population. To truly understand patterns of political engagement, researchers must dispense with the assumption that activism can be summarised by means of predetermined categories or all-encompassing scales and instead adopt an inductive approach that remains sensitive to the varying meaning of each form of action. Practice theory provides a useful entry point to such an analysis because it is sensitive to the relational process by which action takes on meaning in diverse contexts.

By conceptualising repertoires as internally consistent schemas for action that develop as a product of repetitive experiences conditioned by social structure, a practice theory approach can help to uncover systematic patterns of political action and then locate these patterns within broader structures and institutions (Bourdieu 1984; Lizardo and Strand 2010). Because repertoires are internally consistent and necessarily distinct from those of differently situated actors, the meaning of political action can be derived by analysing the make-up of a repertoire and determining what distinguishes it from other clusters of practices. Patterns of practice can then be situated in relation to broader sets of dispositions and political habits as well as the structural location of the actor.

This chapter’s findings suggest that countries vary not only in terms of overall levels of activism but also in terms of how citizens organise the forms of engagement available to them into

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cohesive strategies for political activism. Although this chapter has begun to address within- country difference in how citizens organise political action, future research would benefit from more in-depth analyses of how national contexts moderate the relationship between individual- level dispositions and activism. Case studies focusing on the particularities of different regimes and their role in shaping political action repertoires would be a useful starting point. The results in this chapter are illustrative of important cross-national differences in political engagement repertoires and their association with distinct social locations and dispositions, but these relationships should not be read as causal. More research is required to further model these associations. Finally, the data used here is cross-sectional, and future research would benefit from analysing trends over time to better understand how shifts in political culture relate to changes in national patterns of engagement.

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Appendix

Table A1 – Descriptive Statistics for MCA

Std. Mean Min Max Dev.

Class 2.991 0.940 1 5

Education 1.959 0.779 1 3

Voted in last election 1.818 0.385 1 2

Union membership 1.223 0.416 1 2

Political orientation 3.105 0.998 1 5

Ability to counter law 1.358 0.479 1 2

Political efficacy 1.894 0.907 1 3

Understanding of politics 1.463 0.499 1 2

Perception of democracy 3.118 1.179 1 5

Trust in others 1.599 0.490 1 2

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Chapter 5

Conclusion

This dissertation examines and revises major tenets of the cross-national literature on political engagement. The findings suggest that standard measures and operationalisations of political engagement oversimplify how people participate in political activism. By imposing on their data overarching scales or categories based on un-validated assumptions, scholars limit their ability to understand nuances in political engagement cross-nationally. Combined with an over- emphasis on discovering universal pathways to engagement, this problem has resulted in a lack of attention to the contextually-grounded, process-driven nature of political participation.

I unpacked the unfounded assumptions of extant theory by highlighting the complex and situated nature of civic engagement. In doing so, I show that political participation is a complex form of social action. Rather than sharing abstract properties such as risk, cost or proximity to formal institutions, different forms of engagement cluster in nationally distinct repertoires of activism, sharing some regional similarities. National context drives the relationship between individual-level factors and political engagement. It also influences the form that activism is likely to take in a given context. The mechanisms behind differences in engagement operate at the level of citizens’ daily experience in the political and social milieu of their country. There are no universal patterns of civic activism or pathways to political engagement. National context, as a vessel of daily experience, moderates not only the development of individuals’ political engagement repertoires but also the way that political demands are translated into action.

By locating political action within individuals embedded in national contexts and imbued with culture, this work also contributes to the broader literature in social movements. Social movements scholars have been paying increasing attention to the role of culture in directing the

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development and success of movements. Concepts such as frames and political opportunities are used to understand why some political ideas and mobilisations become successful in distinct contexts while others do not. However, this line of research backgrounds individual actors as agents in directing social change. By focusing on frames, resources and opportunities as concepts that do real work in the social world, scholars risk severing these important processes and conditions from the people and contexts that give them life.

For these reasons I advocate for a renewed focus on the individual actor, conditioned by his or her daily experiences in the social world, as the unit of analysis in studies of political behaviour. As an individual, the actor is both a reflection of the social world in which he or she operates and an agent of its transformation. In the aggregate, similarities and differences in actors’ political behaviour can be used as a window into the cultural and political processes that differentiate regimes. At the same time, as suggested by social movement scholars, large scale changes in how citizens perceive the state and their role in it has the potential to transform those same regimes.

Future scholarship may benefit from continued investigation of political engagement as action rooted in cultural repertoires.

To accomplish this task, research on political participation must move beyond several assumptions in the literature. The first relates to how political engagement is operationalised.

Chapter 2 shows that one of the most common measures of activism, the non-institutional engagement scale, is too broad to be useful for understanding differences in activism. Non- institutional participation as a category can be split into three distinct forms of engagement – individualised, communicative and collective. Distinguishing these forms is imperative because they are practiced by different segments of the population and are more prevalent in some countries

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than in others. Broad claims about the inclusivity of non-institutional engagement as compared to institutional participation therefore needs to be re-examined and rendered more nuanced, as certain forms of non-institutional activism are more accessible to some segments of the population than others.

A second broad assumption, the existence of universal pathways to civic engagement, is examined in Chapter 3. I demonstrate the limitations of this assumption by evaluation the relationship between protesting and national context. In particular, I test Castells’ (2015) overly deterministic theory of social movement development in the 21st century. Castells’ theory is characteristic of much contemporary literature on political engagement, which focuses on the relationship between grievances, access to Internet-based communication and activism. Some scholars argue that electronic means of communication organised horizontally so as to link status equals create ideal conditions for the development of cross-national mobilisation networks. The findings in Chapter 3 suggest that while engaging in online communication and information gathering does increase the odds that someone will attend a protest, national context moderates how grievances and individual-level beliefs about one’s state translate into political engagement.

These findings challenge the central tenet in the political engagement literature, namely that we can arrive at one, more or less universal model for examining political engagement. In reality, standard predictors of political engagement such as trust operate differently in different national contexts.

In addition to moderating the relationship between individual-level beliefs and engagement, national context conditions the way people engage politically. Chapter 4 builds on the critiques developed in Chapters 2 and 3 by showing that individual- and country-level differences in political engagement are the product of national structures, culture and individual

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dispositions. There is no single causal mechanism shaping political activism cross-nationally.

People choose particular configurations of engagement because their daily experiences, conditioned by national and social location, allow them to develop cultural dispositions that are more conducive to some forms of engagement rather than others. In Western democracies, where citizens enjoy access to varied avenues for political engagement, people tend to have broader, more diverse repertoires of activism encompassing activities ranging from protesting to donating money.

This pattern is especially true for highly educated, politically informed and financially stable respondents. Such people have the cultural capital or know-how to engage confidently in a wide variety of activities. In contrast, citizens of struggling or repressive regimes have more limited political repertoires that exclude engagement with formal government or market-based institutions. Low trust in government and general political alienation are associated with attending demonstrations or simply discussing politics with friends. Importantly, the meaning of protest changes in different national contexts. For instance, people in Western regimes combine protesting with contacting political representatives. However, protesting takes on a different meaning where it is the only avenue for political self-expression. In the latter instance, protesting becomes a way to express political demands while circumventing traditional institutions. It is such differences in the meaning and availability of different forms of engagement cross-nationally that drive differences in activism. The importance of culture – defined as a repertoire for action made up of cultural skills, and habits – challenges a third tenet of the contemporary literature on political participation, which generally restricts the analysis of culture to the examination of values.

Limitations and Future Research

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Despite its contributions, this work has methodological limitations. The first relates to the availability and structure of political engagement data. Because most cross-national data sets are modeled on Almond and Verba’s original 1959 survey, the structure of questions and response items are influenced by many of the assumptions criticized in this dissertation. Specifically, capturing dispositions as measures of culture distinct from values and resources is challenging.

Although most items included in the Multiple Correspondence Analysis in Chapter 4 relate to respondents’ assessment of their previous engagement and general ability to enact change, some dispositions, such as efficacy, could arguably fall under the “resource” category employed by rational choice theorists (Corcoran et al. 2015). Use of such non-robust measures renders arguments in Chapter 4 susceptible to criticism by proponents of other theories of political activism. Unfortunately, in the absence of more varied measures of cultural dispositions, the analysis in Chapter 4 had to be limited to the included variables. Nonetheless, I make a plausible and, I hope, convincing case for a revised and expanded consideration of the role of culture in understanding patterns of political participation.

Another problem relates to the response options for political engagement measures. The data used in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 do not allow for the construction of measures capturing frequency or intensity of political participation. In all three chapters, the outcome variables measure whether a respondent has ever engaged in one or a number of political activities. As a result, I am unable to comment on which factors translate into frequent activism as compared to occasional participation. This is problematic because the engagement repertoires of people who participate in frequent political activity may be different from those of people who engage sporadically or infrequently. The datasets used for all three chapters were also limited in the variety of countries surveyed. The majority of respondents in the ISSP samples (used in Chapters 2 and 4) come from

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relatively wealthy and democratic regimes. Only four of the countries surveyed are classified as not free or partially free by Freedom House (Freedom House, 2014). An over-representation of wealthy democratic regimes was also a problem in the World Values Survey data used in Chapter

3. If institutional and financial forms of civic engagement are disproportionately practiced by people in democratic regimes, under-representation of repressive or struggling states skews the findings.

Beyond issues inherent in the data, the findings of this dissertation point to other important avenues of research which could not be fully explored within the scope of this work. Although the dissertation’s core chapters are attentive to the effects of national context both as an independent variable and as a moderating factor, all the findings reported relate to patterns found in the aggregate. For instance, Chapter 4 reports general trends in country-level LCAs but the MCA results are based on one overall LCA model estimated on all countries combined. Further research comparing countries directly is needed to tease out how the specifics of national context affect engagement in country-specific forms of activism. Further research is also needed to clarify the processes driving differences in engagement. Broad measures of national wealth, inequality and freedom need to be supplemented with more in-depth analyses of national history and political structure.

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