Abstract
This chapter studies the influence of emotions on participation in social movements in the context of Turkey. In line with the current interest on social movements, Erisen explores whether anger and fear promote distinct behavioral tendencies in social mobilization. To that end, this chapter employs an experiment to test whether anger triggers approach behavior by increasing the likelihood of participation in social movements whereas fear decreases that propensity. The study also aims to investigate whether enthusiasm motivates people to participate in social movements more than anger. The influence of emotions is tested while controlling for the contextual effects of recent Turkish political developments, specifically the Gezi Park demonstrations.
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Notes
- 1.
While protesting is a democratic right, the nature of protest ranges from peaceful to extremely violent. Instead of debating which types of protests or which actions in protests are democratic or not, in this chapter I opt to focus on exploring the mechanisms that lead people to participate (or not to participate) in social movements.
- 2.
Usage of social media in organizing social events and gatherings is a separate topic to be explored in a different setting, but social networks remain critically important in this case.
- 3.
Building on discussions concerning the use of convenience samples in the literature (particularly Druckman and Kam 2011; Mullinix et al. 2015), I do not expect any behavioral differences between the current sample and the broader population with respect to emotions and their effects on participation in social movements. In fact, given the previous finding, young people are more likely to participate in social movements (see Chrona and Capelos 2016; ErdoÄŸan and Uyan-Semerci 2017), using student samples in this context providing a better test of the hypotheses posited in this chapter.
- 4.
An additional control for distinguishing between those who support conflicting sides of the demonstrations could be political ideology. This variable would indicate whether one supports or opposes governmental policies with respect to the events.
- 5.
Following the distinct effects of anger versus fear, I also predicted a stronger effect for those who were experimentally manipulated to feel hatred, whether in the context of the Gezi Park protests or in the no-context situation. I pretested this assumption prior to the current study and found that anger and hatred promoted almost equal effects that were statistically indistinguishable from each other on similar dependent variables. Thus, I opted for using the anger treatment to manipulate that targeted emotion in the current study.
- 6.
Identification of the Speaker of the Grand National Assembly, the President of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Turkey, any minister from the current government, the current Minister for EU Affairs, the US President, and the UK Prime Minister. Another item asked participants to name an MP from his/her voting district. The final question asked for the number of years before general elections must be held in Turkey. A research assistant unaware of the research hypotheses coded all responses as correct or incorrect. The sum of the correct responses generated the variable of political knowledge for statistical analysis.
- 7.
These items asked whether the participant follows the daily news, thinks about politics, would be interested in receiving info bulletin on politics in general, and would be interested in receiving info bulletin on the decisions taken in the parliament.
- 8.
Participants were asked to report their monthly family income. The response options included 14 categories from 1 (500 YTL) to 14 (9000 YTL) or more per month. A variable splitting the distribution of this variable into three equal groups was used in the empirical analysis.
- 9.
Female is coded 1, otherwise 0.
- 10.
In Turkey, general elections are always held on a Sunday.
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Erisen, C. (2018). Emotions and Participation in Social Movements. In: Political Behavior and the Emotional Citizen. Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58705-3_6
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