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Emancipative Values and Non-Violent Protest: The Importance of ‘Ecological’ Effects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Abstract

This article examines the impact of values on a key phenomenon of modern politics: non-violent protest. Previous studies have examined only the individual-level effects of values. Studying in addition the ‘ecological’ effects – how the social prevalence of values affects protest – generates new insights. Focusing on ‘emancipative values’, two ecological effects are shown: (1) the prevalence of emancipative values lifts people's protest above the level that their own emancipative values suggest (elevator effect); (2) the prevalence of these values enhances the impact of people's own emancipative values on protest (amplifier effect). We conclude that examining values in models of protest (and possibly of other activities), not only as individual attributes but also as ecological properties, gives ‘culture’ its full weight in explaining behaviour.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

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19 Barnes, Samuel H. and Kaase, Max, eds, Political Action (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979)Google Scholar.

20 Dalton, , Citizen Politics; Norris, Democratic Phoenix; Dalton, van Sickle and Weldon, ‘The Individual-Institutional Nexus of Protest Behaviour’, p. 62Google Scholar.

21 Documentation of fieldwork, questionnaires, and data of the WVS are available for download at: www.worldvaluessurvey.org.

22 These and all other variables that we use in our re-examination of the DVW Model are described in detail in the Appendix, to be found at http://www.journals.cambridge.org/jps.

23 Going farther back to rounds one and two of the WVS does not widen the country sample; it only adds repeated observations. Repeated observation is uninteresting for the cross-sectional analyses that follow; it is only interesting from a longitudinal perspective. Hence, we reserve an extension to all rounds of the WVS for the longitudinal analyses after the cross-sectional analyses. For the cross-sectional analyses, every country is included once by the latest or only available survey. Country samples are weighted to equal sample size without increasing the overall N.

24 For the precise factor loadings, see Note 01 under ‘Explanatory Notes’ in the Appendix.

25 For a validation of this statement, see the analyses in Notes 02 and 03 under ‘Explanatory Notes’ in the Appendix.

26 To this point see Alexander, Amy C. and Welzel, Christian, ‘Measuring Effective Democracy: The Human Empowerment Approach’, Comparative Politics, 43 (2011), 271289CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 As DVW report, ‘voice and accountability’ correlates more closely with protest than with rule of law (see Dalton, van Sickle and Weldon, ‘The Individual–Institutional Nexus of Protest Behaviour’, fn. 46).

28 van der Meer, Tom W. G., de Grotenhuis, Manfred and Scheepers, Peer L. H., ‘Three Types of Voluntary Associations in Comparative Perspective’, Journal of Civil Society, 3 (2009), 227241CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Paxton, Pamela, ‘Association Membership and Generalized Trust: A Multilevel Model across 31 Countries’, Social Forces, 86 (2007), 4776CrossRefGoogle Scholar. We experimented with various societal-level measures of membership, but this never produced strong results and none that altered the other societal-level effects.

30 The exception is per capita GDP for which no theoretical maximum is known. We standardize per capita GDP into an expectable range between a minimum of US$500 per capita (0) and a maximum of US$50,000 (1.0).

31 We do not z-transform variables. Z-scores are relative to the empirical distribution of a variable but we are interested in scores relative to the theoretical range of each variable. Scale range standardization is preferable for variables whose theoretical endpoints have meaning and exist empirically.

32 Like DVW, we re-examined all models (a) under the exclusion of petitions and (b) as logistic hierarchical models with a dummy version of the dependent variable (coded 1 for having participated in any activity and 0 otherwise). These alterations produce statistically weaker results but are similar to the ones reported here in terms of significances and relative effect sizes. Detailed documentation is available upon request from the authors.

33 In replicating the DVW Model, we treat all individual-level variables as random.

34 This most recent version is described in Welzel, Christian and Inglehart, Ronald, ‘Values, Agency, and Well-Being: A Human Development Model’, Social Indicators Research, 97 (2010), 4363CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Welzel, Christian, ‘The Asian Values Thesis Revisited’, Japanese Journal of Political Science, 12 (2011), 131CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 We have experimented with alternative prevalence measures, using the percentage of people per society who are in the upper half, third, quartile and quintile of the emancipative values index. Doing so generally produced similar results to those that follow, but with lower statistical power.

37 One might think that including an individual-level measure and an aggregate measure of the same variable imports endogeneity. But this is not the case. In a sample of 1,000 respondents, any aggregate measure reflects for each respondent up to 99.9 per cent of the responses of all other respondents. Thus, aggregate measures are up to practically 100 per cent exogenous to each respondent.

38 Variables are mean-centred because this diminishes collinearity in interaction terms. Individual-level variables are country-mean centred to isolate their within-country variation. Since this means to subtract a constant from each variable, scale ranges are not affected. Accordingly, the interpretation of coefficients as showing the ratio of change in the dependent variable relative to the change in the independent variable is unaffected.

39 For the opportunities component, amplification means that higher group involvement at the individual level translates more easily into protest when voice and accountability is higher at the societal level. For the resources component, it means that higher education at the individual level translates more easily into protest when material means (i.e., per capita GDP) are more abundant all over a society.

40 Put differently, a change in values over the entire scale range corresponds to a change in protest over only a 0.31 fraction of the full scale range.

41 Testing amplifier effects requires specification of interactions between a variable's individual-level and societal-level manifestations. Under this specification, coefficients are conditional: they represent each main effect's impact under the condition that the other main effect is at zero. After mean centering, this property is convenient because it shows each main effect's impact for the most common case. We tested each main effect's unconditional effect too (i.e., in the absence of interaction terms). They are almost identical.

42 Even though societal-level opportunities, resources and values correlate strongly, their independent variance is still large enough to separate their effects. This is obvious from the variance inflation factors obtained by regressing protest on each of these three variables. For each of them, the variance inflation factor remains below the critical threshold of 5.0 (3.6 for opportunities, 4.4 for resources, 3.4 for values).

43 In contrast to opportunities and resources, the societal-level measure of values is an aggregation of the individual-level measure. This means lesser independence between the individual and societal measure in the case of values. Lesser independence decreases the likelihood that the individual and societal measures show up with strong independent effects. The fact that they show such effects nevertheless cannot be dismissed as a methodological artefact. It requires a substantive interpretation.

44 Inglehart and Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy, chap. 2.

45 One might suspect that we obtain similar results when using an ecological measure of post-materialist values instead of emancipative values. We do not. The third model in Appendix Table 1 shows this.

46 See Cingranelli, David L. and Richards, David L., ‘Human Rights Project’, at www.ciri.binghamton.eduGoogle Scholar.

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