The Effect of Exogenous Critical Events on the Mobilization of Digital Social Movements

Abstract

We study the effect of exogenous critical events on the mobilization of digital social movements in the context of Finnish citizens’ initiatives. Critical events are occurrences that direct unusual and high levels of public attention to an issue for a brief and limited point in time. We argue that critical events mobilize social movements because they focus attention on movement issues, trigger activating emotions, and synchronize the actions of activists. Our study combines data from the Finnish justice ministry, the national public broadcasting agency YLE, Google Trends search interest data, and hand-collected data from online sources for a sample of 573 initiatives. We find that critical events greatly increase the mobilization of supporters for initiatives. Critical events increase mobilization especially when events are unpredicted or stay salient for longer times. Media attention and coalition resources also increase mobilization. Our findings suggest that timing can substitute for coalition resources. The combination of critical events and high coalition resources is rare as only small coalitions seem to be quick enough to mobilize in response to critical events. The results imply that timing matters but that it is difficult for large and well-resourced coalitions to time campaigns opportunistically.