Protest Behaviors Research Articles

Guns and Democracy: Anti-System Attitudes, Protest, and Support for Violence Among Pandemic Gun-Buyers

The last decade has given rise to substantial concern about democratic backsliding in the U.S. Manifestations include decreased trust in government, conspiratorial beliefs, contentious protests, and support for political violence. Surprisingly, prior work has not explored how these attitudes and behaviors relate to gun-buying, an action that provides people with the means to challenge the state. We address this topic by focusing on the unprecedented gun-buying surge during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a survey with over 32,000 respondents, we find that—relative to pre-existing gun owners (who did not buy during the pandemic) and the non-gun-owning public—pandemic gun-buyers are more likely to distrust government, believe in conspiracies, protest, and support political violence. These anti-government views and protest behaviors are especially likely among those who bought guns for political reasons. Our findings highlight a crucial dynamic underlying the recent spike in gun sales with consequences for American democracy.

Protest behaviors among patients placed in seclusion in a psychiatric emergency service.

Patients placed in seclusion for behavioral dyscontrol often perceive that the health care team is treating them inappropriately. These patients may express their indignation in many ways. To better characterize these behaviors, we conducted a study of protest behaviors in a psychiatric emergency service. Video surveillance of seclusion room occupants is routinely reviewed as part of our safety protocol. For 1 month in 2022, we noted the frequency and timing of potential protest behaviors such as disrobing and evacuation. Descriptive statistics were applied. A total of 41 seclusion events (8.1%) occurred over the surveillance period, which included 504 initial emergency psychiatric evaluations. Six patients (14.6%) engaged in protest behaviors (all within 5 minutes of being placed in seclusion), including 3 (7.3%) who urinated and 3 (7.3%) who disrobed. One patient urinated almost immediately (2.4%), and another urinated 25 minutes after entering seclusion; the latter was not interpreted as a protest behavior. Immediate behaviors in seclusion that are different from behaviors that led to seclusion can be interpreted as protest behaviors. The 2 most often observed protest behaviors were urination and disrobing.

Special Report: Autism Spectrum Disorder and Inflexible Thinking—Affecting Patients Across the Lifespan

Special Report: Autism Spectrum Disorder and Inflexible Thinking—Affecting Patients Across the Lifespan

Is Protest Only Negative? Examining the Effect of Emotions and Affective Polarization on Protest Behaviour

This contribution sheds light on the link between affect and protest behaviors. Using data from a voter survey conducted around the 2019 elections in Belgium, we examine two dimensions of affect: a vertical one, i.e., negative and positive emotions towards politics in general, and a horizontal one, i.e., affective polarization towards fellow citizens. Our findings make three important contributions. First, we identify five distinct classes of respondents depending on their emotions towards politics (apathetic, angry, hopeful, highly emotional, and average). Second, we demonstrate that the combination of both anger and hope is more strongly associated with protest action than anger alone. By contrast, apathy, characterized by an absence of emotions towards politics, is negatively related to protest behavior. Third, we show that affective polarization is a key driver of protest behavior per se. We also show that the two dimensions of affect have distinctive effects. Yet they interact: Affective polarization towards political opponents compensates for the absence of emotions towards politics in general.

Political opportunity, democracy, and 40 years of protest, 1981–2020: A cross‐national analysis

ABSTRACTObjectives: Political opportunity is considered an important factor in any kind of activism, as it represents the context or norms in which a movement operates. Much of the extant literature has focused on political opportunity on a case‐by‐case basis with little consistency in its operationalization. Our goal in this study is to build toward a generalizable measure of political opportunity. To do so, we measured opportunities as democracy and used data from 90+ countries over a 40‐year period, testing the long‐theorized inverse‐U relationship between opportunity and protest.Methods: We used all seven waves of the World Value Survey, which represents much of the world's countries, to examine the link between political opportunity and political behaviors (signing a petition, joining boycotts, and attending peaceful protests).Results: Results confirmed the inverse‐U effect on all three protest behaviors; that is, middle‐of‐the‐road democracies had the highest levels of protest participation, whereas the most representative and most repressive societies had the lowest levels of protest participation.Conclusion: Democracy can be used to represent important dimensions of political opportunity, as it was consistent with the long‐theorized inverse‐U. Moreover, our approach to using democracy, a cross‐national index, may serve as a stepping stone toward a unified and generalizable measure of political opportunity.

Satisfied unlike me? How the perceived difference with close network contacts prevents radical and protest voting

Fitting with a common scheme across European democracies, the last election in Belgium led radical (left and right) parties to increase their vote share. One of the key drivers of the radical vote is political dissatisfaction (Droste 2011). Yet, the latter does not always translate into radical or protest voting behaviors. Using the 2019s RepResent Belgian Elections Study, we show the moderating effect of close social contacts in this relationship. For dissatisfied voters who believe that most contacts are similarly discontent, the probability to vote for radical parties (or, if not, to adopt other protest behaviors) is reinforced. However, the odds decrease the more they perceive their contacts different from themselves, i.e., as politically satisfied voters. Then, they become more likely to avoid protest/radical choices and to vote for institutionalized parties. Overall, our study yields findings showing that voting behaviors should be studied by considering also the voters’ social networks, which seem to exert a role in defining the acceptability of voting choices. What matters is not only how one perceives politics but also how one believes his close contacts perceive politics too.

Evolutionary game analysis of stakeholder behavior strategies in ‘Not in My Backyard’ conflicts: Effect of the intervention by environmental Non-Governmental Organizations

Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) involved in ‘Not in My Backyard’ (NIMBY) incidents can effectively restrain the protest behavior of stakeholders. With or without the involvement of environmental NGOs, a tripartite game model among the government, operating enterprises and surrounding residents is built by complying with the evolutionary game theory. Subsequently, the tripartite evolutionary game is simulated by exploiting the system dynamics to investigate the stability of stakeholder interactions, and the effect of different reward and punishment strategies on game processes and equilibrium states with the involvement of environmental NGOs. The simulation results are presented below. First, without the involvement of environmental NGOs, the equilibrium point of the tripartite evolutionary game system is expressed as (0, 0, 0), and it will not be altered for changes in external variables. NIMBY conflicts are inevitable. Second, with the involvement of environmental NGOs, their behavioral decision-making strengthens rewards and punishments more rigorously, which can efficiently decrease the proportion of their protest behaviors, while causing the fluctuation of the evolution curve. Last, to ensure the high stability of the game process, a dynamic reward and punishment mechanism should be introduced to act on the evolutionary game system of the stakeholders. As stressed in the mentioned findings, (1) the evolutionary game modelling and system dynamics simulations show that the intervention of environmental NGOs can effectively avoid NIMBY conflicts. (2) The involvement of environmental NGOs can reduce NIMBY conflict behavior of stakeholders, whereas static rewards and sanctions can cause the stakeholder evolutionary curve to fluctuate. (3) To alleviate the fluctuation, environmental NGOs are required to introduce the dynamic reward and punishment mechanism. To be specific, changes in penalty coefficients can improve the achievement of the desired state. The present study puts foreword specific and illuminating recommendations which can mediate NIMBY conflicts in various nations.

Infants' stress responses and protest behaviors at childcare entry and the role of care providers.

During the transition from home to childcare, 70 15-month-old infants were videotaped, and their negative emotions were rated. Infants' attachments to mothers were assessed prior to child care entry and to care providers five months later using the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP). Infant heart rate was monitored at home, during adaptation to childcare (mothers present), and during subsequent separations. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) was computed from the beat-to-beat measures of heart rate to reflect vagal tone, which is reduced during chronic states of stress, and was collected upon Arrival, during in-group Play, and when in the Group more generally. All infants responded to childcare entry with low RSA levels indicating stress. However, during adaptation with the mother present, RSA was higher for securely attached infants. On the first separation day, 35.3% of the infants fussed and cried extensively. These intense protests predicted later secure attachments to care providers, which adaptively helped to reduce stress, especially in infants who protested extensively, as if summoning their mothers back. Because extensive protest suggests limited regulatory capacities, infants risk overburdening the stress system when left unsupported.

ТЕРРИТОРИАЛЬНЫЕ СООБЩЕСТВА В ПРОСТРАНСТВЕ МЕГАПОЛИСА: К ВОПРОСУ О ТЕРМИНАХ

The article analyzes scientific literature on the topic of the significance of the transformation of territorial communities in the space of a metropolis. It is shown that there are systemic difficulties in the analysis of a number of social phenomena due to the lack of generally accepted formulations of such concepts as “territorial communities”, “megalopolis space” and the differences between the concepts of “territory” and “space”. It is concluded that the aforementioned definitions should be determined by the social processes that occur in modern society, since today they acquire special significance as independent scientific categories in assessing both individual events caused by short-sighted decisions of the authorities and growing negative social phenomena in the form of protest behaviors that result from them.

관광기업의 사회적 범죄에 대한 고객의 경멸감과 항의행동에 관한 연구

This research explores consumer response against tourism corporate irresponsibility. Through empirical surveys with adult consumers, this study demonstrates how consumers' negative moral emotional responses to corporate infractions instigate, in combination with other-regarding virtues, protest behavior toward the corporation. The collected data were analyzed with SPSS 18.0 program to examine the route model fit and confirmatory factor analysis. The mediation, moderation effect and the moderated mediation effect analysis were verified with PROCESS Macro program. At each stage the significance test was carried out by using bootstrapping method. The results of this study are as follows. First, the mediation effect of contempt was significant in the pathway from corporate social transgression to protest behaviors. Second, contempt on protest behaviors was moderated by other-regarding virtues. Third, the moderated mediation effect of contempt by other-regarding virtues was significant between corporate social transgression and protest behaviors. The results provide scholars and managers with the means of understanding consumers' reactions to tourism corporate irresponsibility.

Understanding Emerging Adults’ National Attachments and Their Reactions to Athlete Activism

Recently, striking numbers of U.S. professional athletes have protested social injustices during the customary pregame national anthem (e.g., not standing in protest to police brutality). Fans have met athletes’ protests with mixed reactions, thus calling into question whether fans’ national attachments might help explain their reactions. In this empirical study of emerging adults ( N = 514), we posit and find that disapproval of athlete activism is related significantly to overall national attachment. Decomposing national attachment into its respective subdimensions, we also find that fans’ disapproval relates most strongly to uncritical patriotism followed by national identity, symbolic patriotism, and constructive patriotism. Leveraging partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and importance-performance analyses, we offer a rare multifaceted look into how national attachments can shape fans’ reactions to athletes’ social protest behaviors.

Dynamics of Political Protests

AbstractThe links between protests and state responses have taken on increased visibility in light of the Arab Spring movements. But we still have unanswered questions about the relationship between protest behaviors and responses by the state. We frame this in terms of concession and disruption costs. Costs are typically defined as government behaviors that impede dissidents’ capacity for collective action. We change this causal arrow and hypothesize how dissidents can generate costs that structure the government's response to a protest. By disaggregating costs along dimensions of concession and disruption we extend our understanding of protest behaviors and the conditions under which they are more (or less) effective. Utilizing a new cross-national protest-event data set, we test our theoretical expectations against protests from 1990 to 2014 and find that when protesters generate high concession costs, the state responds in a coercive manner. Conversely, high disruption costs encourage the state to accommodate demands. Our research provides substantial insights and inferences about the dynamics of government response to protest.

Pricing a rural development program: uncertainty, indifference, and protest behaviors

AbstractThis article presents an econometric approach to modeling uncertainty, unwillingness to pay, and protest behavior in contingent valuation studies. For that purpose, a mixture model with sample selection is developed for a multiple‐bounded uncertainty elicitation format. The proposed theoretical framework is applied to evaluate the social welfare impact of implementing a sustainable rural development program. Results show that a “naive” analytical approach that excludes protesters from the analysis would result in significantly higher willingness to pay estimates for those individuals who favor the implementation of the program and agree to reveal their true reservation prices.

Spiritual Struggle Among Patients Seeking Treatment for Chronic Headaches: Anger and Protest Behaviors Toward God.

This study examined anger and protest behaviors toward God among 80 US adults seeking treatment for chronic headaches (66 women, 14 men; 71 completed treatment). Measures were administered before and after an intensive 3-week outpatient treatment program. At both times, anger and protest toward God correlated with lower pain acceptance, more emotional distress, and greater perceived disability. However, when considered simultaneously, anger predicted sustained distress, whereas protest behaviors (e.g., complaining, questioning, arguing) predicted both reduced distress and an increased sense of meaning. These findings suggest the utility of distinguishing between anger toward God and behaviors suggesting assertiveness toward God.

Behavioral and facial thermal variations in 3-to 4-month-old infants during the Still-Face Paradigm.

Behavioral and facial thermal responses were recorded in twelve 3- to 4-month-old infants during the Still-Face Paradigm (SFP). As in the usual procedure, infants were observed in a three-step, face-to-face interaction: a normal interaction episode (3 min); the “still-face” episode in which the mother became unresponsive and assumed a neutral expression (1 min); a reunion episode in which the mother resumed the interaction (3 min). A fourth step that consisted of a toy play episode (5 min) was added for our own research interest. We coded the behavioral responses through the Infant and Caregiver Engagement Phases system, and recorded facial skin temperature via thermal infrared (IR) imaging. Comparing still-face episode to play episode, the infants’ communicative engagement decreased, their engagement with the environment increased, and no differences emerged in self-regulatory and protest behaviors. We also found that facial skin temperature increased. For the behavioral results, infants recognized the interruption of the interactional reciprocity caused by the still-face presentation, without showing upset behaviors. According to autonomic results, the parasympathetic system was more active than the sympathetic, as usually happens in aroused but not distressed situations. With respect to the debate about the causal factor of the still-face effect, thermal data were consistent with behavioral data in showing this effect as related to the infants’ expectations of the nature of the social interactions being violated. Moreover, as these are associated to the infants’ subsequent interest in the environment, they indicate the thermal IR imaging as a reliable technique for the detection of physiological variations not only in the emotional system, as indicated by research to date, but also in the attention system. Using this technique for the first time during the SFP allowed us to record autonomic data in a more ecological manner than in previous studies.

Consumer response to corporate irresponsible behavior: Moral emotions and virtues

A unique theoretical framework for explaining consumer word of mouth and protest behaviors against corporate irresponsibility is developed and tested. Through field surveys with adult consumers, this study demonstrates how consumers' negative moral emotional responses to corporate infractions instigate, in combination with other-regarding virtues, negative word of mouth and protest toward the corporation. Negative moral emotions include contempt, anger, and disgust; whereas other-regarding virtues entail justice, beneficence, equality, and communal cooperation. The results provide scholars and managers with means of improving their understanding and handling of consumers' reactions to corporate irresponsibility.

Predictors of Protest Among Anti‐Globalization Demonstrators1

Anti‐globalization protest is analyzed as a function of ideological opposition to social hierarchy and identification with the social movement. Demonstrators (N = 145) at the Summit of the Americas in Québec City in April 2001 completed measures of social dominance orientation (SDO), social identification with the anti‐globalization movement, and the likelihood of engaging in various protest behaviors. Results supported the hypothesis that social identification mediates the link between SDO and inclinations toward 2 forms of collective action (anti‐globalization protest and indirect protest), whereas non‐normative protest tended to be endorsed most strongly by male demonstrators. These relationships inform theoretical perspectives on politicized collective identity and the social psychology of social movement participation.

Transformations sociales et transition en Russie : « Intelligentsias »* et emploi, 1988-1994

Marie-Rose Belgodere, Social transformations and transition in Russia: "intelligentsias" and employment, 1988-1994. This paper, which examines the job behaviors of the "professionnels" since the 1970's, uses data from the Sociological Institute of the USSR/Russian Federation Academy of Sciences, interviews conducted by the VCIOM, national statistical data and the press. The turning point in employment was seen in 1988 with the adoption of legislation authorizing the first non-state employers since the NEP. In the result three types of behavior are preliminary distinguished: limited protest behaviors, dominant waiting behaviors and significant mobility behaviors, occurring on a small scale with respect to generalized economic depression. These types of behavior are in line with previously observed strategies and expectations, particularly among youth.

The Preconditions and Consequences of Relative Deprivation: Two Field Studies1

Two field studies assessed the preconditions and behavioral consequences of relative deprivation. A sample of single mothers receiving government assistance participated in Study 1, and a sample of working women participated in Study 2. We found general support for a 2‐factor model of the preconditions of relative deprivation, in which wanting the desired state and deserving the desired state were the best predictors of discontent. In both studies, discontent regarding the status of one's group (i.e., single mothers or working women) was specifically predictive of reports of group‐directed protest behaviors. In Study 2, discontent regarding one's own status was specifically predictive of willingness to engage in self‐improvement behaviors. Participants in both studies reported more group discontent than personal discontent. These findings provide support from naturalistic settings for the construct of relative deprivation.

Personal Influence, Collective Rationality, and Mass Political Action

We propose two models to explain why individuals participate in collective political action—a personal influence model and a collective rationality model. Each model overcomes the free-rider problem posed by conventional rational choice theory and left unresolved in previous research. The models are tested for legal and illegal protest behaviors, using data from a national sample and two samples of protest-prone communities in the Federal Republic of Germany. The personal influence model is supported for both forms of participation, while the collective rationality model is supported for legal protest. We discuss implications of the results for grievance and rational choice theories of collective political action.