Participation and Political Protest- A Causal Model With Australian Evidence 1991

Political Behavior, Vol. 13, No. 3, 1991

PARTICIPATION AND POLITICAL PROTEST: A Causal Model with Australian Evidence

Clive Bean

This paper examines a model of political participation and political protest that includes the several well-established modes of orthodox participation as well as a number of dimensions of political protest, and also takes account of the causal order between conventional participation and protest. The analysis indicates that previous findings dem- onstrating a substantial positive association between unidimensional measures of conventional and unconventional political behavior are incomplete and indeed somewhat mis- leading. The connection between orthodox participation and protest weakens as the style of protest becomes more unorthodox, to such an extent that none of the separate modes of conventional participation are directly related to "radical" protest. Using sheaf coefficients, the paper also tests the relative explanatory power of three sets of determinants of participation and protest: social background characteristics, general orientations toward polities, and attitudes toward issues. Issues are repeatedly weaker than the other two groups of variables in predicting conventional participation but have relatively strong effects on political protest, particularly compared with political orientations, while social structure is consistently influential.

The multidimensionali ty of political participation is now well established empirically in a wide variety of cultural settings (see especially Verba, Nie, and Kim, 1971; 1978). Mass political participation takes a number of different forms each of which is quite distinct from, although often related to, the others. But research on political participation frequently proceeds from a rather narrow view of what participation entails, arguably resulting in an inadequate picture of the range of political activities that the mass public actually undertakes (for elaborations of such an argument , see Salisbury, 1975; Sehonfeld, 1975; Rusk, 1976; Conge, 1988). The narrowness of focus varies in degree, with some writers tending to equate political participation simply with voting (for example, Lipset, 1981), while others identify a

Clive Bean, Research Fellow, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National Uni- versity, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia,

253

0190-9320/91/0900-0253506.50/0 © 1991 Plenum Publishing Corporation

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greater range of activities, most of which are nevertheless still largely associated with the electoral process (for example, Lane, 19,59). Somewhat more broadly, Verba, Nie, and Kim (1971; 1978), reporting on their highly influential cross-cultural research project, define participation as having four "modes": campaigning, voting, communal activity, and personalized contacts (see also Verba and Nie, 1972).

Yet, even this definition is rather limiting. Mass political participation may take other forms as well, such as political protest, and some re- searchers have acknowledged this greater diversity by including a protest dimension along with the more conventional political activities in discussions and analyses of participation (for example, Welch, 1975; Huntington and Nelson, 1976; Milbrath and Goel, 1977; Barnes, Kaase, et al., 1979; Mishler, 1979). Others have looked at political protest and violence as a separate topic of study from more orthodox participation (for example, Hibbs, 1973; Marsh, 1977; Muller, 1979).

But conventional participation and protest activity are seldom linked to one another in the literature even though it could reasonably be expected that there might be some degree of association between them. Further- more, the possibility that protest activity may not be a single dimension itself is rarely canvassed. After all, political protest ranges in style from relatively subdued and passive acts like signing a petition, to acts of hostil- ity and violence such as rioting. Research that does identify more than one dimension in political participation of a more unorthodox kind and/or makes connections between it and conventional participatory activity has mainly tended to be conducted at the level of aggregate cross-national analysis (Hibbs, 1973; Powell, 1981; 1982). 1 Studies using individual-level data that show a relationship between conventional and less conventional forms of participation have not usually taken the investigation much further than noting with interest that such a relationship exists (for example, Marsh, i977; Muller, 1977; Barnes, Kaase, et al., 1979). And finally, the question of causal order among the various acts of participation and protest is generally neglected in discussions of the subject, a serious omission given the centrality of the concept of mass participation to democratic theory (see Pateman, 1970).

For Australia, the country that forms the specific focus of this paper, the ground is even thinner. A small, exploratory study in the 1960s had a single "active" participation scale that included one or two protest-type items (Wilson and Western, 1969) and one recent paper has investigated the modes of orthodox participation in Australia (Bean, 1989), but thorough empirical analyses of political participation more broadly defined or of political protest on its own are noticeably lacking.

PARTICIPATION AND POLITICAL PROTEST 255

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~" .:~ ~-.." "~',...,partieipation

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~ ~ ~ ---- ~ ---- .....~-----'~ Radical Attitudes towards ~ protest issues

Note: Solid lines represent stronger effects and broken lines represent weaker effects.

FIG. 1. A Causal Model of Political Participation and Political Protest

A CAUSAL MODEL OF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION A N D PROTEST

This paper attempts to fill in the above-mentioned gaps by identifying different dimensions of political protest and investigating the causal linkages between them and the more conventional forms of participation. The analysis also considers the influence of a wide range of attitudinal and social structural determinants of participation and protest, the effects of which help elucidate and underpin essential differences in the nature of conventional and unconventional activity. Figure 1 sets out a formal model of the determinants of political participation and political protest. Some indication of the anticipated strength of associations is provided by the use of solid arrows, for stronger effects, and broken arrows, for weaker effects. The diagram is a simplified version of how the model is actually operationalized in the analysis to follow. There are, for example, four different types of orthodox participation and numerous individual social structural and attitudinal variables. Details of the empirical substance of the model are given in due course. The present discussion focuses on its broad contours.

For terminological convenience the phrase orthodox political participation is used to denote the conventional modes of democratic participation as defined by Verba, Nie, and Kim (1971) while less conventional styles of political participation are distinguished by the term protest. The model operates at five different causal levels in all. Among other things it posits a distinction between milder forms of protest (writing to a newspaper, collecting signatures for a petition, and the like), termed tow-level protest, and radical protest, such as participating in illegal demonstrations or disrupting a march or meeting.

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The model assumes not only that orthodox participation is causally prior to and has an impact on both types of protest but also that low-level protest is prior to and has a eausal effect on radical protest. The causal order postu- lated appears well justified when one considers that the various acts of so- called democratie participation can be undertaken with greater ease and have fewer potential costs than most forms of protest activity are likely to carry. Once having engaged in a conventional partieipatory act, however, it is quite likely that one may be more inclined to move onto less orthodox political activities. Such a conception of the processes involved thus "gives rise to the hypothesis that some kind of positive relationship will exist between the preparedness to engage in conventional and in uneonventional political behavior" (Kaase and Marsh, 1979, p. 151). A number of previous empirical studies have indeed found a positive conneetion between orthodox participation and political protest or aggressive political behavior (Marsh, 1977, p. 58; Muller, 1977, p. 456; 1979, p. '23t; Marsh and Kaase, 1979a, p. 93). In a study using data from West Germany, Muller (1977, p. 456) concludes that "those who show no participation in conventional activity are virtually certain not to participate in aggressive activity; those who participate in conventional activity are unlikely to participate in aggressive activity; but practically all of those who participate in aggressive activity also participate in conventional activity." This description implies a very definite causal sequence, consistent with that depicted in Figure 1: Con- ventional political activity of some kind is more or less a prerequisite for partieipation in unconventional political activity.

Yet we should not pass over this conception of the connection between orthodox and unorthodox political behavior without due reflection, since in the absence of this empirical evidence to the contrary, it would have been possible to make a plausible theoretical ease that political protest was negatively related to eonventional participation. After all, conventional political behavior is generally regarded as a system-legitimizing kind of activity whereas, in its most extreme manifestations political protest is essentially antisystem in nature. Thus, Marsh and Kaase (I979a, pp. 93-94) greet the discovery of positive correlations between conventional participation and protest activity with some surprise: "How could this be?" they ask. "In all popular understanding of the subject, protest behavior implies a departure from the orthodox pathways of political redress. Protesters are supposed to be alienated from mainstream politics. That is why they protest, isn't it?" On the contrary, the evidence that exists all indicates that rather than being in some sense opposites, protest and orthodox participation are more properly conceived of as lying within the same broad behavioral sphere.

Perhaps the most eontentious part of the causal flow posited by the model in Figure 1 is the arrow running from orthodox political participation


to low-level protest. Comprising acts such as writing to a newspaper, helping collect signatures for a petition, or attending a public meeting, with the aim of getting public oMcials to change decisions, low-level protest can be distinguished from orthodox participation, and assumed to be causally subsequent to it, because it is essentially a response (usually of a negative kind) to political events or government actions and decisions rather than a citizen-initiated, positive action that participatory activities such as voting or campaigning ]br a political party tend to be. Although restrained in execu- tion, low-level protest is nevertheless intrinsically eonflictual in character, being an expression of dissatisfaction with so-called democratic decision making as opposed to reflecting a desire to participate in the democratic process for partieipation's sake. For these reasons, and in particular because tow-level protest is a reaction to political system-centered stimuli and not a citizen-centered action, orthodox political participation can be seen as prior to low-level protest. At the same time, low-level protest is a much less intense response than radical protest and therefore recourse to the latter is likely to be less common and to come later in the causal sequence and also to be less closely related to orthodox activity.

Further back in the causal chain we have two separate groups of attitude variables that are assumed to lead to the different ]brms of political activity. One of these groups contains what we might call '°general orientations toward polities" and is made up of such attitudes as interest in polities, partisan leanings and their intensity, political efficacy, and political trust--attitudes that largely indicate support for the political system. The other set of attitudes reflects social values and ideological stances on a range of political and social issues, such as trade unions, abortion, and conservation of the environment. Finally, prior to these sets of attitudes are background social characteristics that have the potential to influence political participation and protest both directly and indirectly, through the two clusters of attitude variables.

Large bodies of evidence have demonstrated the relevance of all three groups as determinants of political activity. With this model, however, we can focus on the nature and extent to which the different sets of variables shape the various styles of orthodox participation and political protest, and advance a number of testable propositions. Nie, Powell, and Prewitt (1969, p. 825), for example, claim that soei'~ status "tends to affect political participation through its impact on political attitudes and cognitions which, in turn, facilitate political activity." Following this argument we can hypothe- size that social characteristics will have substantial total effects on the different types of political activity but only small direct e~cts .

Evidence i?orn other research suggests that issues and values may be likely to have a greater impact on political protest activity than on eonven-

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tional participation (Farah, Barnes, and Heunks, 1979; Inglehart, 1979; Klingemann, 1979; Dalton, 1988). Protest frequently appears to derive from concerns based around specific issues whereas orthodox political activity tends to be much more general in character. In reviewing the findings of their cross-national analysis, Farah, Barnes, and Heunks (1979, p. 444) conclude in a similar vein: "Conventional participation was largely a func- tion of system responsiveness, or support for the rules of the game, while unconventional activity was attributable to unhappiness with the existing political agenda." Thus, we may predict that attitudes toward issues will influence protest to a considerable degree but will not influence orthodox participation.

The same line of reasoning in turn suggests a third hypothesis, that general orientations toward politics will likely play a greater role in shaping conventional forms of participation than in shaping political protest. This is certainly not to argue, however, that we should expect general political orientations to be completely impotent with respect to protest behavior. On the contrary one might anticipate that, in particular, lack of political efficacy, or "alienation" from the political system, and lack of political trust would be significant determinants of protest (see Milbrath and Goel, 1977, pp. 57-74).

The model and methods employed in the analysis permit us not only to take account of the causal sequence among the explanatory variables and to test the above hypotheses but also to examine the relative importance of social structure, political orientations, and issues as factors determining whether or not citizens become participants in various kinds of orthodox and protest activity. In so doing, the analysis also treats the modes of orthodox political participation as intervening between the explanatory variables and the different levels of political protest and in these respects in particular it represents an advance on previous causal analyses of political participation (for example, Nie, Powell, and Prewitt, 1969; Verba, Nie, and Kim, 1971; 1978; Verba and Nie, 1972; Inglehart, 1979).

DATA AND METHODS

The data for the analysis come from the 1984-85 Australian National Social Science Survey, which is a multipurpose social survey of 3012 respondents drawn from throughout Australia, using an area-probability sample; it is representative of the population aged 18 and over. 2 The main analytic methods employed are factor analysis and path analysis. Factor analysis is used to identify the separate dimensions among the participation and protest variables and also to identify dimensions underlying attitudinal variables employed in the analysis. Individual items that cluster together are then combined into seales representing these broader factors.


In the main part of the investigation path analysis is used to give statistical substance to the causal connections depicted in the theoretical model in Figure 1 (as modified for empirical testing in the manner described pres- ently). The path coefficients are estimated using a series of ordinary least squares regression equations. A principal virtue of path analysis, of course, is that it allows us to calculate the indirect and total effects, as well as the direct effects, of variables near the beginning of the causal chain so that the relative importance of the various determinants of participation and protest can be fully assessed (Alwin and Hanser, 1975). Further elaboration of methodological details will appear where appropriate as the analysis proceeds.

Dimensions of Participation and Protest

We begin by examining the empirical dimensions of political participation and protest that factor analysis reveals are present in the 1984-85 Australian data (Table 1). With respect to orthodox political activity, Aus-

TABLE 1. Var imax Rota ted Fac to r Loadings Showing Dimensions of Politieal Par t ic ipat ion and Political Protest

Orthodox Participation Protest

Campaign Communal Personalized Low-level Radical Variable Activity Voting Activity Contacts Protest Protest

Persuade .59 .09 others how to vote

Attend .87 .03 political meetings or rallies

Work for party .87 - . 0 0 or candidate

Vote in 1983 .03 .91 federal election

Vote in state .01 .88 election

Would vote if .09 .83 not compulsory

.14 .15 .13 .08

.13 .02 .04 ,05

.08 - .01 .06 .01

.02 .02 - . 0 0 - . 05

.04 .01 - , 0 2 - . 0 4

.10 .03 .i1 - . 0 6

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TABLE 1. (Continued


Variable Campatgn Communal Personalized Low-level Radical Activity Voting Activity Contacts Protest Protest

Work with others to solve

community problems

Contact a federal govt official about a commu-

ni ty problem

Contact a state govt official about a community problem

Contact a local govt official about a community problem

Contact a federal govt official about a personal problem

Contact a state govt official about a personal problem

Contact a local govt official about a personal problem

Try to get a political decision change by:

Writing to a newspaper

.25 .11 .57 ,13 .25 - . 0 3

.12 .01 .72 .20 .02 .07

.09 .03 .80 .14 .10 .03

.03 .05 .70 .04 .13 - . 00

.05 ,02 ,07 .72 .02 .02

.08 ,02 .14 .73 ,03 .01

.01 .01 .15 .60 .07 - . 00

.05 - .01 .06 .04 .70 .08

PARTICIPATION AND POLITICAL PROTEST

TABLE 1. (Continued

261

Variable


Campaign Communal Personalized Activity V o t i n g Activity Contacts

Low-level Radical Protest Protest

Attending a , I t .09 .20 ,07 .76 .17 public meeting

Collecting .07 ,02 .14 ,02 .74 .21 signatures for a petition

Going on a .09 -,02 .10 .07 .54 .63 legal protest march

Going on a ,06 - .05 .07 .05 .24 .8t banned protest march

Trying to .00 - , 05 .04 .03 ,12 .84 block traffic

Disrupting a .05 - .05 .07 - .06 .04 .74 march or meeting

Source: Australian National Social Science Survey, 1984-85 (n = 3012). Note: The order in which the {actors are listed in the table is for convenience of presenta-

tion. They actually emerged in the following order: radical protest, voting, communal activity, low-level protest, campaign activity, personalized contacts. Eigenvalues for the first six factors were: 4.2, 2.7, 2.0, 1.5, 1.2, 1.0.

tralia proves to be no exception to the general rule established by Verba, Nie, and Kim (1971; 1978) for nmnerous other countries that there are four separate modes of conventional partieipation. Sinee these dimensions (namely, campaign activity, voting, communal activi~,, and personalized contacts) have been discussed in considerable detail in the Australian con- text e lsewhere (Bean, 1989), it is not necessary to dwell on them here except to note that each is shown to be quite distinct.

Of more pressing interest in the current exercise is the fact that Table t reveals two o ther political activity factors as well, represent ing the separate forms of political protest posited in Figure 1. Low-level protest is made up of three items that measure the likelihood of respondents acting to get the authorities to change their m i n d s - - b y writing to a newspaper, a t tending a public meet ing, or helping to collect signatures for a p e t i t i o n - - i f the respondents felt strongly about decisions made by politicians and public offi-

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cials. Radical protest is the likelihood, under the same circumstances, of respondents going on a protest march even though it had been banned by the authorities, trying to block traffic, or helping others trying to disrupt a march or meeting to which they object.

These protest Factors are thus measures of potential to engage in different forms of protest rather than a recording of actual participation in such activities. Given that, for many citizens, political protest of any kind is an extremely rare activity, it is an acceptable and well-validated procedure to measure protest as a propensity in this way (Muller, 1972; Marsh, 1974; 1977; Barnes, Kaase, et al., 1979; Muller and Opp, 1986). Rather than the two scales identified here, though, others studying political protest and aggressive political participation using individual-level data have usually employed single scales to represent such behavior (Muller, 1972; 1979; Marsh, 1974; 1977; Marsh and Kaase, 1979a; Muller and Jukam, 1983). However, these scales tend to be based on items similar to the radical protest dimension in the current analysis. In a recent study using indicators that represent a wider range of styles of protest, Finkel, Muller, and Opp (1989, pp. 891-892) also identify two protest factors, similar to those in Table 1, in West German data (although they do not actually show the results from their factor analysis).

There is one other item in the series that loads on both of the protest factors. It is whether or not, if respondents felt strongly about decisions made by public ot~cials and wanted them changed, they would be likely to go on a protest march as long as it was legal. Conceptually this item appears to sit somewhere between the two principal modes of protest. Argua- bly it is a somewhat stronger course of political action than any of the low-level protest activities, but rather less extreme than any of the items making up the radical protest factor. And this evaluation is borne out empirically. For example, the mean of the legal march item is about midway between the means of the low-level and radical protest scales, indicating that people are more likely to go on a legal march than engage in radical protest but less likely to go on a legal march than participate in low-level protest (see Appendix Table 1). Also, more often than not the correlation of legal march participation with other variables in the analysis comes somewhere between the correlations of low-level protest and radical protest with the same variables (see Appendix Table 4). Furthermore, the factor loading for the legal march item on each protest factor is considerably weaker than the loading of any other item in that factor. For these reasons, propensity to go on a legal march is treated as a separate variable in the empirical analysis--a third dimension of political protest that links low- level and radical protest in the causal chain, being subsequent to the former and prior to the latter.


Other Var iables

In general, the independent variables in the final model are included for a combination of theoretical grounds and on the basis of empirical performance in initial exploratory analyses, where a much wider array of social structural and attitudinal variables was used. Many that proved to be of little importance were dropped in order to help streamline the final analysis somewhat. 3

Like the dimensions of participation and protest, all of the variables measuring attitudes toward issues--namely, attitudes toward economic organization (socialist versus capitalist), trade unions, the environment, uranium mining, abortion, materialism, and postmaterialism--are constructed l~com multiple-item scales identified by factor analysis, as are a number of the items used to measure different orientations toward polities--these being interest in politics, political trust, and feelings of power to influence politics (representing a measure of political efficacy), It is unnecessary to present the factor analyses underpinning these scales here since they have all been documented elsewhere (Bean, 1989; Kelley, 1988; Kelley, Cushing, and Headey, 1987, pp. 248-259; Graetz and McAllister, 1988, p. 250).

The other measures of basic orientations toward politics employed in the analysis--direction and strength of partisanship, direction and strength of left-right location, and subjective social class--are represented by single- item indicators, as are each of the social location variables: sex, age, education, ineome, occupation, trade union membership, urban-rural residence, and church attendance. All of the variables in the final analysis together with their scoring, means, and standard deviations are listed in Appendix Table 1 and a correlation matrix is provided in Appendix Table 4.

Determinants of Political Protest

Figure 2 gives empirical substance to the model of participation and political protest. The coefficients shown for each path are standardized partial regression coefficients (betas), with unstandardized coefficients (bs) in parentheses. In eases where it might otherwise be uncertain, the direction toward which the scoring of variables increases is indicated in parentheses after the variable name. Because multiple individual indicators represent each of the major groups of factors, the diagram is of necessity much more complex than the theoretical model depicted in Figure I. Two particular steps have been taken to maximize clarity and ensure that the focus re- mains On the most important relationships in the model: First, only those coefficients significant at the. 001 confidence level are included in Figure 2; and second, indirect effects of social background characteristics through orientations toward politics and attitudes toward issues are omitted from

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the diagram (or, in other words, only the direct effects of social background characteristics on participation and protest are shown).

Because of the strict inclusion criteria, not all of the variables in the final model thus actually appear in Figure 2. Most that do not (for example, attitudes toward abortion, ideological location, occupation, trade union membership, and income) nonetheless somewhere have substantial direct or total effects on participation and/or protest2 Appendix Tables 2 and 3 flesh out the statistical relationships in the model not shown in Figure 2, with the former containing the effects of soeiaI background on political orientations and issues, and the latter showing the full set of direct and total effects on participation and protest of all variables in the model.

Let us examine the relationships in Figure 2. First, since one of the main aims of this analysis is to investigate the causal connections between orthodox political participation and political protest, it is notable that only two of the four modes of conventional political activity--campaigning and communal activity--appear in the figure. Indeed, were it not for their roles as dependent variables, the other two--voting and personalized contacts-- would have no place in the analysis. There are no links, in other words, between these types of political behavior and any form of protest activity, whether it be low-level or radical or in-between.5

On the other hand, campaigning and communal activity do play important roles. Communal activity is in fact the largest and most immediate determinant of low-level protest. Those who get involved in community- oriented political action are substantially more likely than those who do not to participate in low-level protest activities (beta = .25). Campaign activity also has an influence (.08). In the form of these two modes, conventional participation thus has a substantial positive impact on the propensity to take part in low-level protest. Further back, we see that interest in polities is also important for low-level protest (with a coefficient o f . 17), but no other political orientation variable has a significant effect. Two issue variables-att i tudes toward the environment (- .09) and postmaterialism (. l l ) - -a re significant: Engaging in low-level protest varies negatively with a tendency to give low priority to environmental protection and varies pos- itively with holding postmaterialist values.

The only social background characteristic to have a direct effect on low- level protest is age, which has a negative impact, as indeed it does on all three dimensions of political protest. Interestingly, this relationship is in the opposite direction to the strong influence of age on voting (see Appen- dix Table 3) and on orthodox political participation overall (Bean, 1989). Older people are more likely to vote but less likely to protest--whether it be of a more or less radical nature--than the young. This finding is eonsis-

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tent with data from five different nations presented by Marsh and Kaase (1979b, pp. 131-133).

Moving along the causal chain we see that a large part of the variation in participation in legal marches is accounted for by whether or not people engage in low-level protest (beta = .51). But, whereas communal activity affects low-level protest activity to a considerable degree, it is not directly" related to taking part in legal marches at all; neither is campaign activity, at the .001 confidence level (although it does have a small effect, significant at the .01 level: beta = .05). However, both campaigning and communal activity have significant total effects on legal march activity (see Appendix Table 3), suggesting an important indirect link through low-level protest that acts as a filter for their impact.

Furthermore, gone is the direct influence of political interest. Indeed, no political orientation variable directly affects activity in legal demonstrations. However, legal march participation is related to attitudes toward the mining of uranium (- .08) and to materialist attitudes (-.10), such that those who are against uranium mining and those with a less materialist outlook are more likely to participate. As noted before, age is important ( - . 14), as is sex (.09): Men are somewhat more likely t6 go on legal protest marches than women, even when intervening factors are taken into account.

In its turn participation in legal marches helps explain a good proportion of the variation in the final variable in the model, radical protest (beta = .53). By contrast, low-level protest has only a very mild direct influence on the likelihood of participating in radical political action (.08). Moreover, none of the modes of conventional participation afl~ct radical protest directly.

Two political orientation variables do, however. Strong ideologues of either the left or the right are more inclined to engage in radical protest (.08) and this kind of protest is also associated with a lack of political trust (-.06). Marsh (1977, p. 120) found a similar connection between political distrust and political protest. But, whereas Milbrath and Goel (1977, pp. 69-74) suggest that political trust leads to conventional participation and distrust to radical action, the evidence on this question--particularly on the conventional participation side--is ambiguous in these data: Only voting has a positive association with trust, but most of the other effects are close to zero (Appendix Table 3). It is also notable that feelings of alienation or lack of political efficacy (as measured by the political power scale) have no impact, either direct or indirect, on radical political activity (Appendix Table 3).

Three issue variables are of some importance in shaping radical protest:


those with less Favorable attitudes toward trade unions (- .08) and those who are more materialist ( - .12) are less likely to protest whereas post- materialists are more likely to take part in radical protest (. 07). And, finally, of the social background variables only age directly affects radical political action.

The evidence in Figure 2 (augmented by Appendix Table 3) helps to demonstrate an essential distinction between politieal protest and orthodox participation. While there are some determinants in common, by and large what leads citizens to participate in conventional political activities is different fi'om what may" inspire them to protest. Certain variables, ibr instance, that affect participation in some or all modes of conventional aetivi~" have no impact on any of the dimensions of protest behavior. Place of residence, which influences all modes of orthodox activity, is the most notable of these and strength of partisanship is another obvious one. Even more strikingly, perhaps, age has the opposite effect on each of the protest dimensions to its general influence on orthodox participation. 6

The generally small effects of the modes of participation themselves on protest activity are also particularly noteworthy. As discussed earlier, personalized contacts and voting do not even appear in Figure 2 and the only really sizable effect at all from orthodox participation is that of cmnmunal activity on low-level protest. Likewise interest in politics, the most important variable in shaping conventional participation, influences only low- level protest behavior directly.

More broadly, tile pattern of paths in Figure 2 hints at contrasting roles for the issue variables and the political orientation variables, as predicted at the outset. Paths from attitudes toward issues run exclusively to protest activities whereas more paths from orientations toward politics run to orthodox modes of political behavior than to protest. Thus it appears that, taken as a whole, the impact of issues may be largely confined to political protest and political orientations may influence orthodox participation more than they influence protest. On the other hand, social structure appears to have a certain amount of direct influence on both conventional and unconventional styles of political behavior. These patterns are investigated more systematically in the next section.

Notwithstanding the more striking contrast between orthodox and protest participation as a whole, at the same time each dimension of protest has a distinctly different set of antecedents from the others and there are relatively few overlaps. Of the three protest dimensions, low-level protest--which receives sizable paths from political interest and communal activity--has most in common with orthodox participation, while radical protest--with no direct links and weak total effects--is least like it. Each

268 BEAN

level of protest leads to the next one in the causal chain and the connection with orthodox participation becomes weaker and less direct at each stage.

Grouped Effects: Direct and Total

In discussing Figure 2 we have largely concentrated on direct effects, where arrows run straight from one variable to another. But of course variables further back in the causal sequence may also have an indirect impact on the dependent variable through their effects on one or more intervening variables. For example, education has no direct impact on campaign activity, but it does influence political interest, which in turn influences campaign activity and so education does have a significant total et~ct on campaign activity. The number of indirect linkages in the model of participation and political protest is very large, but we can summarize the total as well as direct effects of different factors by grouping the variables together into their respective sets, such as social characteristics, orientations toward politics, and attitudes toward issues. In addition, this procedure allows us to evaluate the relative strength of the different groups of variables in shaping the various dimensions of political activity and to test the hypotheses advanced at the beginning of the paper.

To achieve this aim we need to use some method of computing a single summary regression coet~cient for each separate set of variables as a group. This is done by the calculation of sheaf coefficients (see Heise, 1972; Whitt, 1986). A sheaf coefficient is "a single measure of multiple effects" (Heise, 1972, p. 157) and is obtained from an index that combines all of the variables in the specified group, weighting each by its effect. 7 The results are shown in Table 2. The principal virtue of presenting the data in such a summary form is the relative clarity and simplicity that it achieves and the resultant ease with which it allows comparison of the effects of each group of variables as a whole. Readers interested in the detail of coefficients for individual variables can find them in Appendix Table 3.

It is instructive to compare the data in Table 2 both along the rows and down the columns of the table. Beginning with an examination of the rows, we see first that the total effects of social characteristics are often considerably larger than their direct effects, particularly on the more radical protest dimensions, since there are several sets of variables that intervene between social structure and protest. To put it another way, with respect to radical protest in particular, much of the total effect of social background comes indirectly through its impact on other factors. Yet, as a group, social Char- acteristics repeatedly have quite substantial direct effects as well, a fact that may be considered somewhat surprising given their position in the causal order and one that generally tends to undermine the hypothesis we began

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270 BEAN

with based on Nie, Powell, and Prewitt's (1969) view that social status influences participation principally via political orientations. When their effects are combined, in other words, sex, age, education, and the like not only help shape attitudes that then influence political activity but they also directly shape participation and protest themselves. ~ Tile largest direct and total effects of location in the social structure are on voting and communal activity; it also has largetotal effects on legal marching and radical protest.

Because there are no intervening variables, the total effects of political orientations and attitudes toward issues on the conventional modes of participation are of course the same as their direct effects. The impact of orientations toward politics is consistently quite large on both conventional participation and protest, although it declines somewhat on the more remote dimensions of protest. In contrast, reminiscent of the consistent patterns in cross-national analyses by Inglehart (1979, pp. 372-376) and Farah, Barnes, and Heunks (1979, pp. 435, 438), the effect of attitudes toward issues strengthens quite markedly when the dependent variable is a protest mode rather than an orthodox participation mode.

These findings confirm the two hypotheses relating to the impact of political orientations and issues, the more strikingly for the latter. 9 Broadly speaking, attitudes of a kind that reflect support for the political system are inclined to facilitate conventional participation but not so much political protest, whereas concerns about particular political issues and political values inspire citizens to protest but not to participate in orthodox political activities. Furthermore, the impotence of attitudes toward economic organization--compared to views on the environment, uranium mining, abortion, and the like--suggests that, to the extent protest is about issues, it is issues of a social or moral character in particular that are crucial and'not bread-and-butter economic issues.~°

When we look clown the colurans of Table 2 and compare the relative effects of social structure, political orientations, and attitudes toward issues, we see that indeed as a group issues are repeatedly far weaker than political orientations or social structure as determinants of the conventional modes of participation. At the same time, political orientations are substantially more important than social characteristics in shaping campaign activity, while social characteristics are somewhat more influential than political orientations on voting and communal activity (even in terms of direct effects on the latter) and a little more influential for personalized contacts (which the model as a whole does not predict well). Overall, however, for conventional participation orientations toward politics and social background come out about even and the salient distinction is between these two sets of variables and issues.

The picture changes somewhat for the dimensions of political protest.


Here the predictive power of issues no longer suffers by comparison with political orientations or social characteristics, in terms of either direct or total effects. For low-level protest the direct effects of the three sets of variables are similar, with issues being slightly ahead. Notice though that the sheaf coefficient representing the four modes of orthodox participation carries the largest weight (both direct and total) in shaping low-level protest. Tile total effects of soeial charaeteristies and espeeially political orientations are naturally eonsiderably larger than their direct effects due to their indirect influence through orthodox participation, while the total effect of issues rises hardly at all because issues have so much less impact on conventional participation.

Turning now to participation in legal marches as the dependent variable, and leaving aside the dominant influenee of low-level protest, we find that attitudes toward issues marginally have the greatest direct effect of the other factors while the impact of political orientations is quite small and that of conventional participation is remarkably weak. Given its substantial indirect influence via low-level protest, the total effect of orthodox activity is rather greater but still smaller than the total effeets of the three eausally prior groups, of which social background and then issues have the highest total efl~ets.

Lastly we focus on radieal protest. Despite the large array of intervening variables in its path, soeiat structure has a stronger direct effect on radical protest than politieal orientations, orthodox participation, or low-level protest and a similar-sized influence to that of issues. Social strueture also has a slightly greater total effect than attitudes toward issues, which in turn have an appreciably larger total impact than political orientations (as well as having a stronger direet effect). To a degree, then, radical protest is about issues but social background is also important, while general political orientations are less influential.

Of the three major groups of explanatory variables, social structure perhaps eomes out as being the strongest overall predictor of the various dimensions of partieipation and protest. Its total effects in particular are consistently large and its direct effects are also quite substantial--probably more so than might have been anticipated.

Finally, the small direct influence of low-level protest on radical protest becomes a large effect in total when the equation is reestimated without the dominating influenee of legal march partieipation. But the grouped influence of orthodox participation is very weak on radical protest with even its total effect being quite small. So, in sum, although the predicted positive influence of orthodox participation on protest does pertain, it is of a substantial size only on low-level protest, it is largely indirect on participation in legal marches, and for radical protest it is distinctly muted.

272 BEAN

CONCLUSIONS

This paper began with the argument that, in addition to the four well- established modes of conventional participation, a comprehensive model of mass political activity needs to include measures of political protest. In these less-well-charted waters a number of significant findings emerge, not the least of which concern the connection between protest and more conventional political action. Factor analysis identifies three empirical dimensions of political protest, indicative of varying degrees of extremism, and the evidence strongly suggests that the findings of previous studies that show a substantial positive association between unidimensional measures of conventional participation and political protest do not adequately represent the complexities involved. For example, the connection between the several modes of orthodox participation and political protest gets progressively weaker as the style of protest behavior becomes more radical.

In fact, only two of tbe conventional participation modes, campaign activity and communal activity, have an independent effect on any of the dimensions of protest at all. Orthodox participation,-in the form of these two modes, influences low-level protest fairly strongly, but there is no direct path (significant at p<.001) from any mode of conventional participation to radical protest. In its separate dimensions, orthodox activity only affects radical protest indirectly through low-level protest and even then only very weakly. On the other hand, low-level protest itself does have a significant direct effect on radical protest as well as a large indirect effect through legal march activity." To the extent that such relationships do exist, then, connections between the modes of conventional participation and dimensions of political protest are indeed generally positive, but the linkages involve subleties that unidimensional conceptualizations of participation and protest miss. Conventional participation is quite closely related to low-level protest but only distantly related to radical protest. ~

It is important to reflect on why this shotdd be so. The answer lies partly in the differing attitudinal bases of conventional and unconventional activity. General orientations toward politics and attitudes toward political issues are both important for mass political activity, but they play quite different roles. In its various manifestations, orthodox political participation is essentially a positive, system-legitimizing form of behavior, underpinned by general attitudes toward politics that reflect support, in the Eastonian sense, for the political system. In turn, however, experience of orthodox political activity is apparently an important factor in leading to further, less conventional, types of political action and hence there is a positive connection between the two. But, although conventional participation may facilitate participation in protest activity, protest itself has a distinctly negative


character, often being an expression of discontent over political issues. Each level of protest leads to the next, but at each stage the nature of the activity changes somewhat, becoming more unorthodox and more likely to be illegal (and in that sense less legitimate). As the style of protest becomes more radical, and its antisystem character increases, it is thus progressively more weakly related to conventional participation.

To the extent that we can generalize from these Australian data--and, given the cross-national regularity in patterns of participation and protest shown in many studies it seems quite reasonable to do so--the findings have certain implications for democratic theory, some of which may bring more comfort than others. On the one hand, it seems that by and large political protest can be viewed as simply another form of rnass political expression, reflecting "the extentand diversity of the behavioral repertory of the participant citizen" (March and Kaase, 1979a, p. 94), On the other hand, though, to encourage political participation of a conventional and system-supportive kind is in due course ultimately likely to generate, albeit indirectly, antisystem behavior.

Acknowlegments: This paper grew out of discussions of the topic with Jonathan Kelley and I wish to acknowledge ray intellectual debt to him; I am also grateful to Ian McAllister and Anthony Mughan for comments on an earlier version.

APPENDIX TABLE 1. Variables Used in the Analysis: Scoring, Means, and Standard Deviations

Standard Variable Scoring Mean Deviation

Social Characteristics Sex 0 Female; 1 Male .49 .50 Age Years 42.55 16.93 Education Years full-time 10.99 3.23 Income Tens of thousands of 1.30 1.31

dollars Occupation 0 Manual; 1 Nonmanual .56 .50 Trade union membership 0 Not a member; 1 .27 ,45

Member Urban-rural 0 Rural; 1 City (>100000) .61 .49 Church attendance 0 Never--ten steps--1 .28 .28

Every day Orientations toward Politics

Subjective class 0 Lower, Working; 1 .54 .50 Middle, Upper

APPENDIX TABLE 1. (Continued)

Standard Variable Scoring Mean Deviation

Ideological location 0 Strongly left--five .56 .22 s t eps - - I Strongly right

Strength of ideology 0 Nonideologue; 0.5 Weak .'29 .35 ideologue; 1 Strong ideologue

Partisanship 0 Labor; 0.5 Other, None; .47 .46 1 Liberal-National

Strength of partisanship 0 Nonpartisan--four .59 .32 steps--1 Very strong partisan

Political interest 0 Least interest to 1 .62 .28 Greatest interest

Political trust 0 Least trust to 1 Greatest .42 .44 trust

Political power 0 Least power to 1 .22 .25 Greatest power

Attitudes toward Issues Economic organization 0 Most pro-socialist to 1 .52 .18

Most pro-capitalist Trade unions 0 Most favorable to 1 .67 .19

Least favorable Environment 0 Most favorable to 1 .34 .17

Least favorable Uranium mining 0 Least favorable to 1 .53 .31

Most favorable Abortion 0 Least favorable to 1 .66 .33

Most favorable Materialism 0 Least materialist to 1 .74 .12

Most materialist Postmaterialism 0 Least postmaterialist to .66 .13

1 Most postmaterialist Orthodox Political Participation

Campaign activity 0 Not active to 1 Most .09 .18 active

Voting 0 Nonvoter to 1 .89 .24 Committed voter

Communal activity 0 Not active to 1 Most .17 .23 active

Personalized contacts 0 No contact to 1 Most .07 .16 contact

Political Protest Low-level protest 0 Certainly would not to 1 .52 .21

Very likely Legal march 0 Certainly would not to 1 .36 .30

Very likely Radical protest 0 Certainly would not to 1 .16 .18

Very likely

Source: Australian National Social Science Survey, 1984-85 (n = 3012).

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A P P E N D I X T A B L E 4. C o r r e l a t i o n s B e t w e e n V a r i a b l e s ( P e a r s o n ' s r)

BEAN

Correlations Variable (i) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (t0) I l l) (12)

(1) Sex

(2) Age - . 0 i

(3) Education .11 - . 3 7

(4) Income .43 - , 1 0 ,33

(5) Occupation - .09 - , 0 3 .39 .17

(6) Trade m0on membership .25 - . 17 ,16 .28 - . 03

(7) Urban-rural .01 - . 03 ,17 ,06 .09 - . 00

(S) Church attendance - . 12 .12 ,05 - .05 .10 - .08 ,0l

(9) Subjective class - .01 ,03 ,30 .15 .30 - . 0 5 .14 .08

ll0) Ideological location .02 .17 - , 08 .03 .07 .14 - , 08 .14 .08

(i1) Strength of ideology ,07 ,11 .04 .07 .10 - . 03 - . 03 .02 .I1 ,38

(12) Partisanship - .02 .07 , ~ .07 .16 - . 17 - .09 .16 .20 .46 . i9 (13) Strength of partisanship - , 0 2 .i8 - . 15 - . 0 4 - . 0 5 - . 00 - . 08 - .01 - . 03 .08 .22 - , 03

(14) Political interest ,16 .16 ,17 ,16 .16 .02 - , 0 0 ,05 .15 .05 .20 .06

(15) Political trust .05 .07 .I1 .04 .05 .07 ,08 .02 .04 - . 0 6 - . 03 - . 18

(16) Political power .06 .06 .04 .06 .04 .02 ,10 ,02 ,09 .01 .06 - .01

(17) Economic organization .04 - . 00 .10 .16 .12 .14 - . 02 .08 .18 .37 .10 ,46

(18) Trade unions .07 .09 - . 05 .01 .08 - . 28 - . 0 9 .0S .08 .39 .i0 .49

(19) Environment .08 .i,t - .13 .04 - . 03 .05 - . 15 - , 08 .03 .25 .07 .22

(20) Uranium minining .18 ,22 - . 0 7 .1:3 - , 0 0 .02 - , 04 .02 .03 .29 .I1 .21

(21) Abortion ,04 - .01 ,06 ,07 .04 .03 .03 - ,41 .03 .08 .02 - . 06

(22) Materialism - , 0 2 .923 --,32 - , 0 9 - . i 4 - , 0 6 - , 13 ,03 - . 0 9 .22 ~02 .06

(23) Postmaterialism - ,03 ,02 - , 09 - . 0 8 - ,11 ,04 - . 03 - .01 - , 0 8 - . I 2 ,01 - . 16

(24) Campagn activity, .12 ,00 ,09 .12 .04 .10 - . 08 ,01 .04 - . 0 2 .17 - .01

(25) Voting - .01 .25 - . 00 .07 ,12 .06 - . 09 .08 05 .06 .10 .03

(26) Communal activity .07 .00 .23 .17 .17 .04 - . I 6 ,09 .11 .02 .12 .10

(27) Personalized contacts .03 - . 00 ,07 .04 .03 .02 - . 13 .04 .01 .01 .04 ,02

(28) Low-level protest - . 02 - . 09 .18 .04 .09 .06 ,0,t ,07 .03 - . 07 .07 - ,02

(29) Legal march .06 - . 24 .18 .04 .04 .13 .01 - , 03 - .01 - . 2 2 .0:3 - . 15

(30) Radical protest .09 - . 28 ,12 .02 - . 04 .12 - .01 - , I I - . 05 - . 25 ,03 - . 18

Source: AustrMian National Social Scienee Survey, 1984-85 (n = 3012).

NOTES

1, One r ecen t except ion is a survey-based s tudy by Finkel , Muller , and Opp (1989) tha t

ident i f ies two d imens ions of protest . 2. The survey was d i rec ted by Jonathan Kel ley and Rober t G, Cush ing of the Austral ian

National Univers i ty and Bruce H e a d e y of the Univers i ty of Melbourne . I t was funded by the Austra l ian Research Grants Scheme and the Research School of Social Sciences at the Austral ian Nat ional Univers i ty . The data w e r e m a d e avai lable th rough the Social Science Data Archives of the Austra l ian National Univers i ty . Ne i t he r the pr inc ipal inves t iga tors nor the funding agencies bear any responsib i l i ty for the analyses or in te rpre ta t ions p r e s e n t e d

here in , A summary of the design, sampl ing procedures , and execut ion of the survey to-


Correlations ~I3) (14) (15) ([6) (17) (18) [19) (20) (211 (22) (23) (2-1) (25) (26) (27) (28) ~29)

,21 ,03 .09 .03 .09 .08

-.0,t .04 -.06 ,00 - .06 -.03 -.24 ~-,05 ,41

.03 -.02 - .06 --o,02 ,24 .23

.07 .i0 .01 ---.01 ,25 .20

.05 .04 .01 .Ol -.04 -,06 ,15 .04 - .07 .0t -,01 ,15 .06 .02 -,08 .04 -.25 -.1.t .23 .30 .00 .08 -.02 -.07 • 27 .24 .08 ,08 .00 .00 ,03 .27 -.02 ,10 .05 .06 ,03 .14 -,04 ,03 .02 .04 .06 .27 -.00 .08 -.06 -.07 .03 .15 .00 ,03 -.15 -.21

-.03 .03 -.03 ,02 -.17 -,25

:36 -.06 01

.03 .16 ~°.O0 -.30 - . I 6 .03 ,50

.0I .02 .05 -.01 .04

.07 .i0 ,06 .09 - , (~ .12 -.02 .Ol ,05 -.06 .0I ,34 .16 -.01 .01 ,01 .02 .02 ,17 .07 .35 - . t 7 -,08 .04 .04 .18 .P?A ,10 ,36 15 -.23 -,21 .09 -.11 ,16 .21 - .0 t .22 .i2 -.19 -.20 .09 - .17 .14 I3 - .09 .08 .05

.58

.38 ,64

gether with a general introduction to it is contained in Kelley and Bean (1988). For more detailed technical information plus the full question wording, response categories, and frequency distributions of all variables in the survey, see Kelley, Cushing, and Headey (1987).

3. I,eaving such variables out of the analysis does not substantially alter the relative effects of each of the three separate sets of explanatory variables--social characteristics, orientations toward politics, and attitudes toward issues--which is an important consideration for the section of the paper focusing on this question.

4. There are three notable exceptions to this rule--subjective class, direction of partisanship, and attitudes toward economic organization--that, given their importance for other forms of political behavior (see, ~br example, Bean and Kelley~ 1988), may have been expected to have an impact but did not. These variables were left in the final model so that their

280 BEAN

impotence on all of the participation and protest modes could be demonstrated (see Appen- dix Table 3), it being the more important to do so since all three have bivariate associations of some magnitude with one or more of the various forms of political activity (see Appendix Table 4).

5. Appendix Table 3 has the details; it also shows the determinants of voting and personalized contacts (see also Bean, 1989).

6. To a lesser extent, and only in terms of the contrast between radical protest and voting, the same can be said of political trust. See Bean (1989) for a detailed discussion of the determinants of orthodox political participation in Australia,

7. It is calculated by multiplying the unstandardized regression coefficient for each variable in the group by the variable's value for each individual case, summing the results for each ease, and then reestimating the equation with the new variable. The resulting standardized regression coefficient is the sheaf coefficient. The sheaf variable can be thought of as the "average" score for the set of variables, taking account of each variable's impact on the dependent variable. The sheaf coefficient is always shown in standardized form because the sheaf variable has no natural scale and thus the unstandardized coefficient cannot be mean- ingfully interpreted. Sheaf coefficients have been usefully employed to represent blocks of variables in a wide variety of applications in the social sciences (see, for example, Kelley and McAllister, 1985; Hanson and Ginsburg, 1988; O'Brien and Gwartney-Gibbs, 1989).

8, Interestingly, the individual social characteristic that appears to have the most consistent effect across the different modes of orthodox participation and protest is education (see Appendix Table 3). Being well educated, in other words, is something of a hallmark of participants in all types of political activity, be it conventional or unconventional.

9. The overall contrast between the effects of attitudes toward issues and political orientations is exemplified by the fact that while interest in politics has a total effect of some magnitude on every dependent variable, no one issue variable makes a significant impact on the whole range of participation and protest styles. Indeed, no issue affects any orthodox participation mode at p<.001; postmateri~ism, however, affects all three protest dimensions both directly and indirectly to some extent--see Appendix Table 3,

10. This provides an interesting contrast with electoral choice, tbr which mainstream economic issues are important and social and moral issues are generally much less so (Kelley, 1988),

11. Among other things, of course, these findings further help justify distinguishing low-level protest from the modes of orthodox participation in the causal sequence. Moreover, in a higher-order factor analysis of all the participation and protest dimensions, low-level protest clearly loads with the other protest variables rather than with the orthodox participation modes.

12. And there is even a hint of a negative relationship between communal activity and radical protest (see Appendix Table 3).

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Documents

Participation and Political Protest- A Causal Model With Australian Evidence 1991