Protest participation propensity cues and selective recruitment: Dyadic evidence on rational prospecting.

Who takes to the streets to protest matters. Protest sends signals to decision-makers and biased participation leads to biased signals. This paper examines one driver of biased participation, namely protest recruiters behaving as rational prospectors by only inviting others who they believe are likely to agree to the participation request. Extant evidence on rational prospecting is indirect as it draws on data collected among recruits. In contrast, this study employs a direct and dyadic data approach whereby potential recruiters for a labor movement demonstration in Belgium are asked, before the protest takes place, about the political viewpoints of specific others (alters) in their network, and then which alters they have invited to participate. After the event, the same respondents are asked for each alter whether they actually participated. We find that the perceived likelihood that an alter would participate in the event exerts a consistent effect on the actual recruitment effort towards that person. Moreover, recruiters' perception that an individual is recruitable is mostly accurate; those perceived to have a high propensity to participate are more likely to take part, regardless of being recruited. Most importantly, our findings show that in the case of a labor union demonstration, prospectors evaluate alters who are co-workers differently compared to other types of social ties.

The missing link in the diffusion of protest: asking others.

Mobilization for protest is a process of diffusion in interpersonal networks. Extant work has found that being asked by people one knows is a key determinant of participation, but the flip side--asking others--has been neglected. The authors examine which prospective participants are most likely to ask others to participate and whom they ask. Drawing on a new and unusual data set including evidence on more than 7,000 participants in 48 demonstrations across Europe, the authors find that activists who are committed to the demonstration's cause (willing to recruit others) and who are part of participation-friendly networks (able to recruit others) are the most active recruiters. Asking others is dependent on being asked: participants tend to recruit people similar to those who have recruited them and, most importantly, participants who are recruited via strong ties are less active recruiters themselves.