Does Learning About Protest Abroad Inform Individuals' Attitudes About Protest at Home? Experimental Evidence from Egypt. Issue 3 (29th July 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Brooke, Steven; Hassan, Mazen
• Is Part Of: Government and opposition. Volume 57:Issue 3(2022)
• Page Start: 428
• Page End: 445
• Publication Date: 2022-07-29
• Subjects: diffusion -- democratization -- contentious politics -- Arab Spring -- experiment; Political science -- Periodicals; 320.05
• DOI: 10.1017/gov.2021.16
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0017-257X

Abstract

Abstract: The Arab Spring revived interest into how contentious mobilization diffuses across time and space. We evaluate individual-level attitudinal implications of this literature through laboratory experiments with 681 Egyptian college students. Across two separate experiments, primes based on recent protests in Tunisia, Syria and the Sudan reveal a limited ability to shift respondents' retrospective views of the Arab Spring, the efficacy of protest to achieve political change, Egypt's perceived domestic situation vis-à-vis its neighbours and a personal willingness to assume risk in a computer game-based behavioural extension. Our findings imply the need to continue to improve theorizing and empirically testing key implications from the diffusion literature.