Dissecting the Spirit of Gezi: Influence vs. Selection in the Occupy Gezi Movement.

Abstract

Do social movements actively shape the opinions and attitudes of participants by bringing together diverse groups of activists who subsequently influence one another? Ethnographic studies of the 2013 Gezi uprising in Turkey suggest that the answer is "yes," pointing to the solidarity exhibited by protesters who previously identified with political groups that were traditionally indifferent, or even hostile, to one another. We argue, however, that two mechanisms with rather different implications could have generated this observed outcome: "influence," referring to a spontaneous change in attitudes caused by interacting with other movement participants; and "selection," meaning that the individuals who participated in the movement were more likely to be supportive of other groups prior to the event itself. We tease out the relative importance of these two mechanisms in the observed solidarity in Gezi uprising by constructing a panel of over 30,000 Twitter users and analyzing their support for the main Turkish opposition parties before, during, and after the movement. We find that although individuals did change their support over time in significant ways, becoming in general more supportive of the other opposition parties, those who participated in the movement were also significantly more supportive of the other opposition parties all along. Together these findings suggest that both influence and selection were important to generating the observed solidarity among opposition supporters, but that selection was the more important mechanism. We also suggest that while our substantive results are specific to the Gezi uprising our method of ex-post panel construction could be useful to studies of social movements and mass opinion change more generally. In contrast with traditional panel studies, which must be designed and implemented prior to the event of interest occurring, ours can be designed ex-post, and hence can be used to study events such as uprisings that are unanticipated by researchers or are inaccessible for other reasons. We conclude that although social media platforms such as Twitter suffer from a number of well-known limitations, their "always on" nature combined with their widespread availability offer an important source of public opinion data to students of social change.