In Politics We Trust…or Not? Trusting and Distrusting Demonstrators Compared

Stekelenburg, Jacquelien van; Klandermans, Bert

doi:10.1111/pops.12464

Cited by 19 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…To our knowledge, there are two main approaches aimed at exploring people's perceptions of their political context regarding protests from a psychological perspective. The first of them Saavedra & Drury 7 has used measures associated with people's trust in political institutions, politicians, and their representativeness (e.g., Lee & Chan, 2018;Li, Lee, & Li, 2016;van Stekelenburg & Klandermans, 2018), whereas the second has used a validated scale of measurement, subjective political openness repression (SPO-R), to evaluate non-participants' perceptions of the restrictions that both the government and the police impose on protests (see . Thus, employing SPO-R, Saavedra and collaborators (2019) have demonstrated that non-participants may support protesters' violence against the police according to the extent people perceive authorities impose harsh restrictions on protests.…”

Section: The Perceived Political Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond peaceful protest: When non-participants support violence against the police

Saavedra¹,

Drury²

2019

Preprint

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One of the most controversial issues related to protests is the use of violence by protesters. Although there is a strong social norm against protest violence, research has suggested that protesters’ endorsement of non-violent actions can change according to the legitimacy of police actions during protests. However, both non-participants’ support for protest violence and its relationship with authorities’ measures regarding protests have barely been studied. To address this, we interviewed 17 British undergraduate students with diverse previous experiences as protesters about their views on protest violence. For the interviews, we used vignettes to describe two fictional scenarios, one where the government and the police actively restrict the right to protest and another where authorities facilitate protesters’ actions. A thematic analysis incorporating elements from the ideological dilemmas approach was carried out to explore the range of arguments related to protest violence. We found that most participants articulated a variety of expressions that made up a recognisable cultural pattern: protest should be peaceful. However, when participants perceived that ‘the right to protest’ was threatened by state repression, those who earlier rejected protest violence argued that they would support the use of violence against the police as ‘self-defence’. Our findings suggest there are pervasive frameworks for interpreting and responding to real contexts of political openness and repression, and reflective of people’s ability to simultaneously hold contradictory views about the legitimacy of protest violence.

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Section: The Perceived Political Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond peaceful protest: When non-participants support violence against the police

Saavedra¹,

Drury²

2019

Preprint

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“…Even though the proposition that political activism may lead to a loss of institutional trust generally would be acknowledged by students of social movement and political protest, the literature on social movement outcomes, nonetheless, tends to be silent on the issue of activism and its consequences for institutional trust (Bosi, Giugni, Uba ; Giugni, McAdam and Tilly ). Instead, studies of this relationship tend to view institutional trust as a cause generating activism (Ejrnæs ; Hooghe and Marien ; Kaase ; Norris ; van Stekelenburg and Klandermans ). Supplementing this approach, the overall contribution of this paper is to argue that the loss of institutional trust should also be analysed as an outcome of activism.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From democratic participation to civic resistance: the loss of institutional trust as an outcome of activism in the refugee solidarity movement

Toubøl

2018

British Journal of Sociology

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Adding to the literature on non-institutional political action and trust, this article argues that the loss of institutional trust is not only a cause but also an outcome of political activism. Studying the Danish refugee solidarity movement in a mixedmethods research design including survey and qualitative interview data, the article shows that three kinds of activism -political activism, humanitarian activity, and civil disobedience -relate differently to the loss of trust in the institutions of the Parliament, the legal system, and the police. Political activism primarily affects a loss of trust in the Parliament due to low external efficacy and a closed political opportunity structure. Civil disobedience affects a loss of trust in the legal system and the police due to a perceived lack of procedural justice. Humanitarian activity does not affect a loss of institutional trust because it does not imply interaction with the institutions to the same extent as the other kinds of activism. The consequence of losing trust in the political institutions is not an abandonment of democratic values, nor political apathy, but rather a change in civic engagement from a mode of democratically legitimizing participation in the institutions to a mode of contending and questioning the legitimacy of the political institutions. This finding indicates that in turn loss of institutional trust may cause an increase in extra-institutional political action which is consistent with the commonly assumed causality in the literature. This leads to a final integrating argument for conceptualizing activism and loss of institutional trust as reinforcing factors in a process where, in line with the main finding of this study, activism may cause a loss of institutional trust which, in turn, may cause additional activism, as argued in the existing literature.

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“…This means researchers need to test if SPO-R and its dimensions are capable of predicting relevant attitudes (e.g., willingness to take part in protests) or (actual) behaviours in relation to collective action. Furthermore, future research should explore the convergent/divergent validity between SPO-R's dimensions and other constructs that have been used in recent literature to assess the political context where protests take place, such as perceived political cynicism, external efficacy, and political trust (see Lee, 2010;Lee & Chan, 2018;Sabucedo, Gómez-Román, Alzate, van Stekelenburg, & Klandermans, 2017;van Stekelenburg & Klandermans, 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Including political context in the psychological analysis of collective action: Development and validation of a measurement scale for subjective political openness

Saavedra

Drury

2019

J. Soc. Polit. Psych.

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Sociological and Political Science research has argued that political conditions affect both the occurrence of protests and the actions protesters choose. However, an approach that considers people’s perceptions on these conditions is still absent in the social psychological literature. Subjective Political Openness (SPO) is a new construct which fills this gap by incorporating features of political context into the psychological analysis of protests. We propose that SPO comprises perceptions relating to three dimensions: government actions to allow/restrict protests, police measures to actively prevent them, and the extent that public opinion legitimizes protests. We conducted two studies in the UK and Chile to validate scales created for each proposed dimension, test their measurement invariance, establish SPO’s configuration, and demonstrate its convergent validity. Participants in Study 1 were university students (n UK = 203; n Chile = 237), whereas in Study 2 a general population sample from both countries was included (n UK = 377; n Chile = 309) with the purpose of generalizing the results. Both studies consistently showed that SPO is a multidimensional construct configured as a bifactor model comprising the dimensions associated with perceptions of the government and police actions to confront protests. Although we tested two different measurement scales for the perceived legitimacy given by public opinion to protests, results demonstrated this dimension is not part of SPO. The SPO configuration has implications for both our understanding of collective action and how we study it.

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In Politics We Trust…or Not? Trusting and Distrusting Demonstrators Compared

Cited by 19 publications

References 26 publications

Beyond peaceful protest: When non-participants support violence against the police

Beyond peaceful protest: When non-participants support violence against the police

From democratic participation to civic resistance: the loss of institutional trust as an outcome of activism in the refugee solidarity movement

Including political context in the psychological analysis of collective action: Development and validation of a measurement scale for subjective political openness

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