Untangling the differential drivers of protest participation: Survey evidence from Extinction Rebellion’s arrestable and lawful actions (2019 and 2023)

Clare Saunders*, Graeme Hayes

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Broad-based climate movements are important shapers and signallers of public demand for efficacious policies to tackle climate change and, through demonstrative and disruptive action, creating windows for policy change. Here, we use a unique protest survey dataset to develop a comparative framework for understanding the drivers of protest participation in two tactically different major climate protests in London staged by the same organisation. Crucially, these protests take place at different phases of the policy window and have different action premises: Extinction Rebellion’s (XR) ‘arrestable’ protests in 2019, and its much more conventional and lawful actions in 2023. By focusing on action design we are able to compare across cases and contrast the drivers of participation in arrestable and lawful actions respectively. By disaggregating variables through bivariate and multivariate analysis, we develop an authoritative approach to the drivers of protest, teasing out the respective importance of different elements of biographical, structural and political availability. We find that, aside from part-time working, biographical availability is not a reliable predictor of participation in the different forms of protest. In contrast, structural availability, and bonding capital in particular, matters more. XR’s arrestable 2019 protests, which had significant policy influence, successfully mobilised more strongly committed participants than its lawful 2023 protests.

Original languageEnglish
JournalJournal of European Public Policy
Early online date29 Nov 2024
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 29 Nov 2024

Bibliographical note

Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the
posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

Keywords

  • Extinction Rebellion
  • structural availability
  • protest survey

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Untangling the differential drivers of protest participation: Survey evidence from Extinction Rebellion’s arrestable and lawful actions (2019 and 2023)'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this