ABSTRACT

Decades of research found that protest participation is unequally distributed over the population. The usual protesters are resourceful, skilled, and politically engaged. We theorize that “open channel” mobilization and mobilization via strong persuasion ties is able to bring unusual protesters to the streets. Additionally, we explore the contextual antecedents of both mobilization types. Results are based on large-scale protest survey data encompassing 71 protests from nine countries. We measure protester (un)usualness in terms of education, political interest, political efficacy and past participation. We find that mobilization via closed information channels and weak persuasion ties generally leads to the well-known skew in participation. Open information channels and strong persuasion ties, on the other hand, tend to decrease the probability of participants being usual suspects and increase the probability of participants being unusual suspects. In sum, not all mobilization fosters inequality.

摘要

数十年的研究发现，抗议参与在人群中分布不均。通常的抗议者足智多谋，技术娴熟，政治参与。我们推测，“公开渠道”动员和通过强大的说服联系进行的动员能够将不寻常的抗议者带到街头。此外，我们探讨了这两种动员类型的背景前因。结果基于包含来自 9 个国家的 71 次抗议的大规模抗议调查数据。我们根据教育、政治兴趣、政治效能和过去参与来衡量抗议者（不）寻常性。我们发现，通过封闭的信息渠道和薄弱的说服联系进行动员通常会导致众所周知的参与偏差。另一方面，开放的信息渠道和强大的说服纽带，倾向于降低参与者成为通常嫌疑人的概率，并增加参与者成为不寻常嫌疑人的概率。总之，并非所有的动员都会助长不平等。