Combining motivations and emotion: The motivational dynamics of protest participation

Abstract

We conducted a study to investigate the motivational dynamics of protest participation. Previous research suggests that instrumental and identity motives together with group-based anger predict people's intentions to participate in protest. The present research combines these motives with ideology into a single model. So far, no study has tested such a model or attempted to assess the motives' relative weight. Our results replicated previous findings by showing that instrumentality, identity, and ideology together with group-based anger motivates people to participate in protest. Importantly, our study extended previous findings by showing that these factors account for variance in motivation among actual participants. More specifically, ideology appeared to be the strongest motivator of protest participation, followed by identity and instrumentality. Next to these main effects, we obtained interaction effects between the three motives and group-based anger, demonstrating the need for complex and sophisticated models.