Abstract
Although there is a developing strand of literature on young people’s participation in environmental activism, there have been few systematic comparisons of their participation in different forms of environmental activism. This article compares the participation of young people and their older counterparts in climate change marches and Global Climate Strikes (GCSs). The agential and structural factors that draw people into protest participation are, in general terms, well recognized. However, it is also recognized that the factors that lead to particular types of protest on certain issues might not be the same as those that lead to different types of protest on different issues. In this article, we keep the protest issue constant (climate change), and make comparisons across different forms of climate protest (marches and school strikes). We coin the term “mobilization availability”, which is a useful way to understand why young people are differentially mobilized into different types of climate change protest. Our notion of mobilization availability invites scholars to consider the importance of the interplay of the supply and demand for protest in understanding who protests and why. We analyse data collected using standardized protest survey methodology (n = 643). In order to account for response rate bias, which is an acute problem when studying young people’s protest survey responses, we weighted the data using propensity score adjustments. We find that the youth-oriented supply of protest evoked by GCS mobilized higher numbers of young people into climate protest than did the more adult-dominated climate marches. GCS did this by providing accessible forms of protest, which reduced the degree of structural availability required to encourage young people to protest on the streets, and by emotionally engaging them. Indeed, the young people we surveyed at the GCSs were considerably more angry than their adult counterparts, and also angrier than young people on other climate protests. Our conceptual and empirical innovations make this paper an important contribution to the literature on young people’s political participation.
Highlights
By August 2018, the Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg had become the world’s most famous climate change activist celebrity
What was it about the Global Climate Strikes (GCSs) that were more effective in mobilizing young people than previous environmental protests? We explore whether changes in the supply of environmental protest have made young people more available for climate protest
They are marginally more likely to attend the demonstration in the company of others that they know, with the highest percentage doing so being among young people at GCSs
Summary
By August 2018, the Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg had become the world’s most famous climate change activist celebrity. Following Saunders et al (2012) we introduce agential factors that shape protest demand—meaning the attitudes, emotions and opinions that make someone more or less likely to engage in protest; as well as structural and biographical availability, which refer to the personal circumstances that determine whether people are “available” for protest participation Combined with supply, these individual level variables make up what we term mobilization availability. We expect young people on adult-dominated climate change demonstrations to have more structural and agentic availability than their older counterparts because they have more barriers to cross to join an adult-dominated protest than older people They will have participated in these protests despite their generation not being targeted by the mobilization efforts. We consider that their mobilization availability weakens the need for additional motivational factors This leads us to our second hypothesis: H2: Young people on youth-driven GCS demonstrations have less structural and agentic availability than young people on climate change marches. For a full list of variables and their measurement, please see the appendix
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