Formation of an emergent protestor identity: Applying the EMSICA to the Gezi Park protests

Abstract

Recent research on collective action indicates the importance of dynamic and culturally diverse perspectives. One of these models, the encapsulated model of social identity in collective action (EMSICA), claims that perceived injustice and group efficacy shape the emergence of novel forms of identity during protests. An emergent social identity is a strong predictor of collective action participation, as recent studies have demonstrated. In this study we aim to test the tenets of the EMSICA in a non-WEIRD context, the Gezi Park protests in Turkey. We conducted a retrospective survey study with 345 activists who participated in the Gezi Park protests. Findings showed that increased perception of injustice of the government’s totalitarian policies, the decision to demolish Gezi Park, police brutality, as well as group efficacy beliefs predicted the Gezi Park protestor identity. Moreover, the emergent Gezi Park protestor identity directly predicted participation in the protests. Our findings highlight that the EMSICA has important predictive power in a non-WEIRD context, the Gezi Park protests, and showed that perceived injustices and group efficacy became facilitators of the emergence of an overarching protestor identity. We believe that the core drivers of collective action should be understood and tested as context-sensitive, and we should extend our understanding about core motivations from global categories to contextual outcomes of intergroup encounters. In conclusion, we hope this study pave the way for understanding dynamics of collective action participation in repressive contexts, demonstrating how injustices such as totalitarian policies and police brutality along with group efficacy become facilitators of the emergence of an overarching protestor identity.

When Society Deteriorates: Political Intolerance, Perceived Anomic Threat and Participation in Anti-system Collective Actions in the Context of Authoritarian Democracy

“…Participants expressed a stronger preference for protest in virtual than in real environment. These results go in the same direction as the data reported by the specialized literature which reveal that in a repressive context, individuals are more inclined to protest against the governing system online rather than offline [1,55]. One of the foundations of this preference lies in the security and identity benefits of the first form of collective actions [43,47,54].…”

“…Three fundamental mechanisms are generally identified: identity, which concerns the degree of identification of the individual with his group; emotions, which are related to the perception that the group is the victim of an injustice in society; and efficacy, which is associated with the belief in the ability of the group to achieve its goals [60,62]. These mechanisms are very often applied to various forms of collective behavior, including non-violent/violent, non-normative/normative or online/offline forms [1,55,58,59,61].…”

‘Coming together to awaken our democracy’: Examining precursors of emergent social identity and collective action among activists and non‐activists in the 2019–2020 ‘Chile despertó’ protests

“…Prosocial disobedience attitude was added as precursor of both social identification and collective action intention A further major purpose of the current study was to compare the two major explanatory collective action frameworks (i.e., EMSICA and SIMCA) in the context of the 'Chile despert o' social movement. Building on the previous research (Bamberg et al, 2015;Chayinska et al, 2017Chayinska et al, , 2019Uysal & Akfırat, 2021;Włodarczyk et al, 2017), we hypothesized that EMSICA (see Figure 1) would be more suitable to explain collective action on behalf of newly formed collective identities as compared to SIMCA (Figure 2).…”

“…However, the main difference between the SIMCA and the EMSICA may not be just the causal sequence of mediation but the content of shared identity as well. Whereas SIMCA has been shown to reliably predict individuals' collective action on behalf of low-status or otherwise deprived social groups, EMSICA might be more suitable to explain it driven by new social identities formed on demands of intergroup context (Bamberg, Rees, & Seebauer, 2015;Chayinska et al, 2017Chayinska et al, , 2019Uysal & Akfırat, 2021;Włodarczyk et al, 2017). Recently, a few collective action scholars (Bamberg et al, 2015;Chayinska et al, 2017Chayinska et al, , 2019Uysal & Akfırat, 2021;Włodarczyk et al, 2017) have sought to provide a comparative test of the main assumptions of both the SIMCA and the EMSICA in the contexts of realworld political social movements (e.g., Ukraine's Euromaidan revolution and Gezi Park protests), concluding that the latter might be better situated to understand the mechanisms underlying bottom-up identity formations related to a particular societal cause.…”

Policing Student Protests in Turkey: From the Promise of ‘Citizen in Uniform’ to Dictating ‘létat c’est moi’

“…It should be stressed that before the Gezi protests the period was not too rosy. The Gezi Park protests, or as some say ‘movements’ (Farro & Demirhisar, 2014 ; Gürcan & Peker, 2014 ; Uluğ & Acar, 2019 ; Uysal & Akfırat, 2021 ), which began at the beginning of June 2013 and continued throughout that summer, started when a small group of environmentalists organized a sit-in against the destruction of a park that was supposed to make way for a new shopping mall in a central district of Istanbul. Although the protestors were met by police brutality, the sit-in later transformed into extensive public demonstrations and snowballed into countrywide protests against the government’s decision.…”