Research methods employed to study non-participants’ perceptions of protests

diverse methods to explore their importance for protests and social movements. Thus, correlational survey studies have been conducted to explore non-activist reasons to legitimate (see Jiménez-Moya, Miranda, Drury, Saavedra, & González, 2019) and support various social movements (Orazani & Leidner, 2019b). In terms of non-participants’ support for specific actions carried out during protests, Gerber and collaborators (2018) have explored people’s support for violence carried out by both the police and indigenous protesters in Chile. Taking advantage of the fact that cross-sectional studies enable us to explore simple relations among diverse variables and that perceived features of the political context regarding protests had not been tested before, in Chapter 3, I conducted a cross-sectional questionnaire survey study using structural equation modeling (SEM) to make inferences employing SPO-R scale. This study included samples from the UK and Chile, making possible the comparison of the same

predictive model across samples and weighting the relevance of each SPO component to explain non-participants’ support for protesters’ violence against the police.

Considering that protests take place in the real world, research on non-participants’

perceptions should include people’s exposure to actual protests (e.g. Schwartz, 2016;

Selvanathan and Lickel, 2019a). However, the main difficulty of incorporating exposure to a real protest in the study design is the availability of a protest that can be used as a reference to the potential participants of the study. Indeed, even when a protest is available, people’s direct exposure to this event is difficult to coordinate. Time and monetary restrictions, as well as the spontaneity and unpredictability of protests, are difficulties that researchers might struggle to address.

To solve the issues mentioned above, researchers may use vignettes in their experimental designs to simulate protest events and explore people’s reactions to diverse situations (see Hughes & Huby, 2004, for a discussion). Indeed, vignettes may be especially useful for the study of non-participants’ perceptions of protests by taking into account that because most people do not have the opportunity to experience protests first-hand, both authorities’ measures regarding protests and what happens with protesters in the streets are necessarily shaped by mass media representations (see Cammaerts, 2012, for a discussion). Thus, in Study 2 reported in Chapter 3, the use of vignettes allowed me to explore whether people perceive the features of political context differently according to the ‘objective’ political settings they were exposed in comparison to a neutral scenario (i.e., control condition).

In Chapter 5, I decided to use vignettes again in two experiments. However, instead of describing diverse political contexts regarding authorities’ tolerance to protests, this time the vignettes were employed to portray public opinion’s legitimisation of protests both in the UK (Study 1) and in Catalonia (Study 2). For this type of experiment, vignettes became a useful resource to provide information similar to an actual news article. Indeed, in addition to including an informative text about the protests mentioned above, each vignette incorporated two different characterisations of public opinion concerning mobilization processes to improve their realism: quotations of bogus interviews from ordinary people, and a pie chart accounting for the results of an opinion poll on people’s legitimisation of protests (see McLeod & Hertog, 1992, for discussion). Moreover, along with the vignette, and following Radburn and collaborators’ (2018) idea to evaluate police procedures during protests, I incorporated footage showing police brutality against peaceful protesters for two reasons. First, to improve the realism of the scenario depicted in the vignette by supplementing this information with a visual stimulus displaying what has happened to protesters in the streets. Second, to go beyond the ‘the static’ elements described in the vignette by incorporating a resource capable of showing the ‘dynamic’

of protest and the changes in the interaction between protesters and the police.

Despite the advantages of survey and experimental designs in the study of non-participants’ perceptions of protests, there are two main limitations. First, because the items included in these studies are aimed at measuring specific dimensions, it is not possible to explore in-depth what people think about protests, the political conditions under which protests occur, or protesters’ actions. Second, both surveys and experiments are tools designed to eliminate individuals’ inconsistencies – making researchers assume that people have unique and fixed opinions about social phenomena, whereas people may

actually have multiple and contradictory thoughts concerning them (see Stimson, 1995, for an overview; Zaller, 1992, for a discussion). Indeed, Billig and collaborators (1988) have suggested that one of the main shortcomings of extensive opinion polls is that in those studies people do not have the chance to experience or at least imagine scenarios that might represent a challenge for dominant ideologies. Moreover, I suggest that due to their focus on testing change using the same restricted measures as used in cross-section designs, even quantitative longitudinal designs cannot account for people’s contradictory ideas about specific topics.

Recently, Stuart and collaborators (2018) have employed interviews and thematic analysis to explore non-participants’ perceptions of protests and their identification with various types of protesters. Similarly, in Chapter 5, I employed interviews and thematic analysis as an analytic strategy to explore non-participants’ reasons to support protesters’

violence against the police. Although the study reported in Chapter 5 was not aimed at analysing discourse styles, the linguistic expressions (e.g., Condor & Gibson, 2007), or delve in the discursive rhetoric deployed by the interviewees (e.g., Billig, 1991; Condor, 2011), I decided to combine thematic analysis with the ideological dilemma approach (see Billig et al., 1988) to explore people’s sometimes contradictory views regarding protest violence. Thus, the ideological dilemmas approach became useful to explore how societal ‘maxims’ (e.g., ‘protests should be peaceful’) may collide with other such beliefs (e.g., the need to defend the right to protest) under specific circumstances (see Gibson, 2011, and Towns & Adams, 2009, for discussions). To put it differently, the incorporation of the ideological dilemmas approach allowed me to go beyond the de-contextualised individual decisions between supporting or not supporting protest violence against the

police to focus on the contradictions people may hold regarding protesters’ actions within a particular political context.