Introducing the Collective Action Recursive Empowerment (CARE) Model: How Small‐Scale Protests Led to Large‐Scale Collective Action in Armenia's Velvet Revolution

Abstract

The current study examined the motivations and outcomes of the Armenian Velvet Revolution through the voice of 18 protesters with qualitative interviews, exploring their motivations for joining the collective action, their perceptions of its implementation, and resultant psychological changes. Participants distinguished between individual‐ and group‐level processes and bypassed social divisions through a shared belief in the value of “Rejecting Serzh” (i.e., opposing then President Serzh Sargsyan). Results also illustrated a recursive process of collective action supporting the development of a new theoretical CARE (collective action recursive empowerment) model. The model understands successful social change as a function of both individual and group identity informing collective‐action processes: Smaller acts of protest increase individual feelings of shared group identity and empowerment/efficacy beliefs, thus strengthening motivations for continued protest and making large‐scale collective action achievable. By linking together multiple time points of a collective‐action process in one recursive model, the current work maps out one specific case of successful collective action in recent history, which serves as a basis for broader theoretical generalization and future empirical research.