Strategic participation in protests: evidence from women’s march in Chile

Abstract

In economics and political science, there is insufficient consensus regarding the strategic incentives individuals encounter when deciding to participate in protests. Although most theoretical models assume strategic complementarity, recent evidence (Cantoni et al., 2019) suggests the presence of strategic substitutability. In this paper, we study how agents’ reference groups can influence their strategic decision to attend demonstrations and protests. In particular, we study whether strategic incentives with respect to the own group — according to some given dimension — differ from those with respect to the other group. To accomplish this, we conduct a field experiment involving undergraduate students from two universities during the 2023 Women’s March in Chile. We define reference groups in terms of students’ (self-reported) household income. Agents are then randomly assigned to one of six treatments, with information about the intention to participate in the march reported by their own group, the other group, the entire sample, or a combination of these. With these treatments, we assess whether agents present heterogeneous strategic incentives concerning their group and the other. Our results indicate that participation of high-income students is substantially underestimated by the entire sample on average, while the participation of low-income students appears to be more accurately predicted. In addition, students from different socioeconomic backgrounds behave strategically differently. Evidence suggests that both groups of students behave as strategic complements, but in regards to different reference groups: while the higher income group demonstrates complementarities with both the own and other group, the lower income group only behaves as complements with the other group.