Protest as One Political Act in Individuals’ Participation Repertoires: Latent Class Analysis and Political Participant Types

Abstract

This study advances research on the role of protest in individual-level participation repertoires by examining how latent class analysis can be used to identify distinctive types of political participants. This methodological approach requires shifting researchers’ traditional theoretical and analytical focus on protest as a single political act to the ways in which political actors combine protest with other political behaviors. From a theoretical perspective, the study examines the increased salience of research on the causes and consequences of protest in the context of individuals’ broader participation repertoires. From a methodological perspective, an illustrative analysis is conducted using the 2016 American National Election Studies survey to test theoretical expectations about the relationship between protest and civic duty. The study concludes with a discussion of how latent class analysis can be used to advance research on protest as one political act in individuals’ broader repertories of political participation.

Digital Issue Movements: Political Repertoires and Drivers of Participation among Belgian Youth in the Context of ‘School Strike for Climate’

“…Capturing political repertoires (i.e., how citizens choose to engage with the various available modes of political action), allows researchers to grasp the state of participatory democracy in a more accurate manner. And thus, by incorporating various participatory modes into research designs, a biased literature can be avoided [4,54].…”

“…Most studies using a repertoire-based approach, have shown how different forms of political action tend to coexist, rather than cannibalize one another. It seems that participation patterns are becoming increasingly hybrid and individualized as they combine different types of participation [4,17,18]. In a study addressing a Belgian climate movement, De Moor, Marien & Hooghe [24] found that forms of lifestyle politics often exist within complex political repertoires that also include state-oriented forms of action.…”

“…Citizens' ways of engaging in civic society have undergone significant changes in postindustrial societies. A variety of studies indicate how citizens have moved beyond mere engagement in institutional politics and are often engaging in diverse forms of participation, such as protesting, consumerism, or volunteering [1][2][3][4][5]. Furthermore, social networking sites (SNS) allow for more personalized, fluid, and creative outings of citizenship [6,7].…”

“…Few empirical studies, however, employ a repertoire-based approach to assess how citizens choose and combine the various available modes of political action, especially within a specific single-issue movement (such as the climate movement). A considerable amount of work regarding participation repertoires has been conducted by Jennifer Oser [4,16,17]. She argues how the increased prevalence of political participation beyond the electoral arena elevates the need for improved research designs, which shift the unit of analysis from a single participatory act towards the combination of different action forms.…”

“…Only a handful of studies have relied on this technique to empirically identify these unique participation repertoires [4,18,19]. Still, these studies often focus exclusively on either offline or online forms of action.…”