Protests as Strategic Games: Experimental Evidence from Hong Kong's Antiauthoritarian Movement*
By Davide Cantoni, David Y. Yang, Noam Yuchtman, Y. J. Zhang. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2019
163 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Social scientists have long viewed the decision to protest as strategic, with an individual's participation a function of their beliefs about others’ turnout. We conduct a framed field experiment that recalibrates individuals’ beliefs about others’ protest participation, in the context of Hong Kong's ongoing antiauthoritarian movement. We elicit subjects’ planned participation in an upcoming protest and their prior beliefs about others’ participation, in an incentivized manner. One day before the protest, we randomly provide a subset of subjects with truthful information about others’ protest plans and elicit posterior beliefs about protest turnout, again in an incentivized manner. After the protest, we elicit subjects’ actual participation. This allows us to identify the causal effects of positively and negatively updated beliefs about others’ protest participation on subjects’ own turnout. In contrast with the assumptions of many recent models of protest participation, we consistently find evidence of strategic substitutability. We provide guidance regarding plausible sources of strategic substitutability that can be incorporated into theoretical models of protests.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1266198ec789dd50bb3446cf2aec440ad2b17180
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Citations in the corpus
- Misinformation During a Pandemic (2020, unknown): “A growing literature uses information provision experiments to study the determinants and behavioral consequences of beliefs (Barrera et al., 2020; Cantoni et al., 2019; Cruces et al., 2013; Perez-Truglia and Cruces, 2017), sometimes focusing specifically on the role of news media (Chen and Yang, 20”
- Designing Information Provision Experiments (2020, methodology): “…have used information treatments to study voting behavior (Aker et al., 2017; Cruz et al., 2021, 2018; Gerber et al., 2020; Kendall et al., 2015; Orkin, 2019) or to study strategic behavior of political activists (Hager et al., 2020, 2021) and protesters (Cantoni et al., 2019; Hager et al., 2019).”
- Political Effects of the Internet and Social Media (2020, unknown): “In particular, Cantoni et al. (2019) use data from a field experiment during a wave of antiauthoritarian protests in Hong Kong to show that beliefs about higher expected turnout of others can lead to lower, rather than higher, protest participation.”
- Misperceptions About Others (2021, background): “…with issues related to stigma and social desirability biases that may affect survey responses and find that this is not a primary concern (e.g., Cantoni et al. 2019, Bursztyn et al. 2020c); however, others have found it to be relevant for particular contexts, such as social distancing…”