Abstract
Collective action and protest have become a normalized political behavior that in many cases defines the political agenda. The reasons why people take to the streets constitute a central subject within the study of social psychology. In the literature, three precedents of protest that have been established as central to the study of this phenomenon are: injustice, efficacy, and identity. But political action is also deeply related to moral values. This explains why in recent years some moral constructs have also been pointed out as predictors of collective action. Moral variables have been introduced into the literature with little consideration to how they relate to each other. Thus, work in this direction is needed. The general aim of this research is to differentiate moral obligation from moral norms and moral conviction, as well as to compare their ability to predict collective action. In order to do so, the research objectives are: (a) conceptualize and operationalize moral obligation (Study 1, N = 171); (b) test its predictive power for intention to participate in protests (Study 2, N = 622); and (c) test moral obligation in a real context (Study 3, N = 407). Results are encouraging, showing not only that moral obligation is different to moral conviction and moral norm, but also that it is a more effective predictor working both for intention and real participation. This work therefore presents moral obligation as a key precedent of protest participation, prompting its future use as a variable that can enhance existing predictive models of collective action. Results regarding other variables are also discussed.
Highlights
Occupy Wall Street, Occupy London, Geraçao à Rasca, 15-M indignados
The theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991) is a good example; here moral norm is usually operationalized as perceived moral obligation, while our results point toward the idea that these two concepts are different even though closely related, which may require reconsidering the adequacy of measuring moral norm with items of moral obligation
The data of Study 1 support the idea that among the three different concepts that account for moral values, moral obligation is the one that works as the best predictor
Summary
Occupy Wall Street, Occupy London, Geraçao à Rasca, 15-M indignados. protest was established long ago as one of the most prevalent forms of political participation, the number of street demonstrations during the last decade has risen remarkably (Kriesi, 2016; Shuman et al, 2016). The 2008 financial crisis had great impact on collective action tendencies (Likki, 2014; Klandermans and van Stekelenburg, 2016; Kriesi, 2016; Sabucedo et al, 2017a) many of them being rooted in anti-system claims (Hughes, 2011; Páez et al, 2013). Despite this increase in protests numbers being closely related to anti-system and anti-austerity claims, the normalization of protest. The three of them will be used to predict intention to participate in collective action in order to test which one is the best predictive variable
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