Breaking Silence or Not: Evidence of Corporate Polarized Voices in Hong Kong Protests

Abstract

Businesses have been increasingly implicated into political contentions, but extant studies know relatively little about how these politicalized businesses would be evaluated by the highly divided society. Drawing on the incumbent/challenger concepts in social movement theory, we theorize that challengers categorize businesses into challenger/incumbent group and translate crisis from political incumbents to the incumbent-sided businesses. However, such categorization unexpectedly helps incumbents identify ingroup businesses to favor and support. By examining review numbers and ratings of local restaurants in Hong Kong during the 2019 Anti-Extradition Movement, we find that even though businesses sided with incumbents received less reviews than businesses on the challenger side, both politicalized restaurants were more positively evaluated during the protests than other-equivalent but apolitical restaurants, and such rating premium would be strengthened if the majority of restaurant diners are from the ingroup. Our findings give implications for research on category evaluation, social movements, and political polarization studies.