Stop Tweeting, Start Building Organizations and Talk to Your Friends
By Kevin Reuning
In the last few months, there have been mass mobilizations across the globe. In Puerto Rico, Iran, and Hong Kong people have taken to the streets to demand changes. For some, these mobilizations are lessons for what needs to happen to push Republicans to vote to remove Trump from office. Pundits frequently bemoan the lack of mass resistance to Trump and wonder why there hasn’t been a larger mass resistance to his very clear abuses of power. While some speculate that the acquittal-in-all-but-name just decided in the Senate may change the status quo, our data do not provide much optimism.
Although there is no single reason why there have not been larger protests, at least part of the reason is that no one is being asked to join them. And when they are being asked, it happens too often through social media.
To address this, we asked several questions about participation in pro-impeachment rallies in a recent YouGov survey of 1,619 registered voters that were likely to participate in the Democratic Primary -- fielded from January 18th to 27th. This was a panel survey, although here I am only using the second wave results. See below for full details on the survey methodology.
The survey was fielded after the recent wave of impeachment protests organized by MoveOn and other organizations. Seven percent of Democratic primary voters reported that they had attended a pro-impeachment protest in the last three months. Given that people often exaggerate their participation in political events, it is likely that this is an overstatement, but we can still look at who said they attended protests and who did not.
One of the more obvious findings on protests is that participation is dependent on being asked to participate. We find the same results here. Of those who were asked to attend a protest, 22% went on to attend one; only 1% of those who were not asked to attend a protest did so. The problem is that 71% of Democratic primary voters report they were not asked to join an impeachment protest. Below we show the different ways that individuals were asked, and what proportion of those that were asked actually went to a protest. The most common invitation method was via social media with 15% reporting that they were invited via social media, 12% reporting being invited by an organization, and 11% by friends or family. Not all of these invites had the same sort of attendance rates. For example, 30% of those invited by an organization attended a protest, while only 24% who were invited by social media attended a protest.
Many people were invited to protests through multiple different pathways. Of those that were invited, 54% were invited via at least two different sources. One way to disentangle how different types of invitations matter is to estimate a logistic model of protest attendance including all the different pathways of attendance as dummy variables.
Below, we show the estimated coefficients for the invitation options from two different models: one with just dummy variables for the types of invites (we call this the restricted model) and a second with an array of demographic variables (race, gender, age, political interest, and ideology). In each logistic model of attendance, being asked by a friend or family member or being asked by an organization are significant predictors of attendance. In contrast, being asked on social media or someone else had no significant effects on attendance. Not surprisingly, never being asked is a significant predictor of not attending.
Looking at the full model, we find that the protest invitation is the only consistently significant factor in predicting attendance. There are no differences across other categories; political interest has a small effect but it is poorly estimated once the indicators of invites are added.
These results suggest that person-to-person and organization-to-person invitations matter. We need to consider, though, that those who are engaged in politics are likely to build networks with others who are engaged in networks. The invites might not explain attendance, but instead reflect a high degree of engagement in politics which then explains protest participation. If this were the case, simply inviting more people to protest might not by itself lead to a proportional increase in protest attendance. Even with this caveat, these results indicate the importance of real-world organizing and networking building. No mass movement happens without people working together to build power. If you are interested in building a movement to remove Donald Trump, you need to build that movement -- you can’t tweet it into existence.
Kevin Reuning (@kevinreuning) is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Miami University.
Survey Methodology
This survey was conducted in two waves. The first included 2,953 interviews conducted from June 24th to July 2nd, 2019 by YouGov on the internet of registered voters likely to vote in the Democratic presidential primary in 2020. A sample of 6,116 interviews of self-identified registered voters was selected to be representative of registered voters and weighted according to gender, age, race, education, region, and past presidential vote based on registered voters in the November 2016 Current Population Survey, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. The sample was then subsetted to only look at respondents who reported they were likely to vote in their state’s Democratic primary or caucus. The weights range from 0.2 to 6.4 with a mean of 1 and a standard deviation of 0.5.
The second wave included 1,619 interviews based on recontacting respondents participating in the first wave (a 55% recontact rate). Respondents participated from January 18th to January 27th, 2020. This sample was weighted on gender, age, race, education, region, and past presidential vote to the weighted sample proportions from the first wave. The weights range from 0.5 to 4.5 with a mean of 1 and a standard deviation of 0.4.