Risk Acceptance and Contentious Politics: An Understanding of Protest Activity

Abstract

What are the individual characteristics which motivate individuals to participate in contentious politics? This dissertation claims that risk acceptance as a psychological concept allows us to understand the individual predispositions that impact participation in protest activity. This dissertation project is significant to the field of political science in that it theorizes about the characteristics that make individuals risk acceptant and utilizes risk acceptance in the study of contentious politics, which has not been done before. I import claims from social psychology to highlight how lack of completion of several life cycle markers-which I name risk weights, such as marriage, parental status, and educational attainment amongst others-make individuals more risk acceptant. Once these risk weights are mapped onto risk, it allows one to determine and explain when protest activity is likely to occur. My dissertation uses a mixed-method approach to examine the relationship between risk acceptance and contentious politics. It is divided into the following components: one measure for risk acceptance, two online experiments, and field interviews in Chile. There are two main claims that this project posts: The first is that high levels of risk acceptance correspond with higher likelihood of participation in different forms of contentious political events, with case study work focusing on protest activity in Latin America. The second claim is that risk acceptance is a function of risk weights. The more risk weights that an individual has, the less likely they are to participate in contentious politics. Conversely, the fewer risk weights that an individual has, the more likely they are to participate in contentious political action. One of the important contributions of my work is that it treats risk acceptance as a purely psychological factor, one that is stable and only changes in accordance with risk weights, but that is not impacted by the context in which individuals are embedded. This means that the decision to participate or not participate in contentious political action is a function of the interaction between risk acceptance and some other contextual factors which are beyond the scope of my present research. This dissertation aims to identify the likelihood of participation for any individual. Social psychology has been underutilized in the study of contentious politics and can provide insights into why individuals self-select into these movements. In the context of worldwide mass mobilization, this allows us to understand the underlying individual psychological predispositions that lead to mass mobilizations and waves of mobilizations. Examining how these psychological mechanisms manifest themselves into various forms of contentious politics has important potential applications for the study of contentious politics.