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Protest campaign movements are often carried out by coalitions rather than by homogeneous groups. Accordingly, an opposition member has both a narrow partisan identity and a broad all-opposition identity. Seeking to prevent mass political participation, autocracies can repress protesters regardless of their group membership or apply the “divide and conquer” principle, targeting specific groups. Any strategy of repression drives some dynamics of identity. For instance, broad repression may rally the opposition by increasing broad identity at the expense of narrow identity. This dynamic of identity causes complex dynamics of motivation for participation in the protest, which affects the turnout. The paper introduces a computational model to describe the dynamics of the turnout. The model employs the social identity model of collective action (SIMCA) and accounts for the dual protest identity.

In recent decades, the focus of civic engagement research has shifted towards studying social environments’ effects on individuals’ decisions on whether to participate in a given activity or not. Online communication has been increasingly influencing the scale of social environments as well as the features of both online and offline interpersonal communications. Surely, then, individuals’ decisions concerning protest mobilization are bound to be affected by network properties. Using a series of ABM models with different network structures, we try to identify the structural factors of networks that can influence individuals who are deciding whether to join a protest. The established research in this field traditionally points to two structural factors: network topology and homophily. To our knowledge, however, the literature has not considered two above-mentioned structural factors in combination. In other words, their joint influence on protest mobilization has not been tested. To fill this research gap, we combine several network topologies with enabled/disabled homophily and examine how the combination influences protest turnout and survival. Numerical experiments show that homophily is positively associated with the survival of the protest, but negatively with its size for any network topology. Since we infer this conclusion from a theory-based computational model, we also propose how empirical testing can be conducted. Acknowledgments: This research is supported by the Russian Science Foundation under grant no. 20-18-00274, HSE University.

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