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Chapter 2 LITERATURE REVIEW
Literature that explores why people engage in protest is always evolving.
Scholars have continuously studied this issue, and there lies several theories without one definitive answer. There are a couple of reasons why the matter has not been made very clear. First of all, much of the existing social movement literature is based on specific case-studies. Most of these studies were written to focus around certain social movement events. Therefore the concepts written about cannot be transferred and applied to the entire realm of social movements. For example, some scholars have studied what drives participants in a specific event or protest cycle (McAdam, 1988), but it looks at each particular movement separately rather than focusing on characteristics of all movements in general. Secondly, protest motivation theories have been researched by several different schools of thought, resulting in each research program having separate protest motivation answers such as grievances, emotions, framing, etc. Hence, these new studies are constantly changing protest participation understanding. This paper attempts to address these issues and looks at the factors that brought students out in this particular case of the Sunflower Movement. There are motivating factors in one’s environment that encourages them during times of protest. Although this is intended to be applicable only for the Sunflower Movement, we can still look back at other concepts that have been studied in the past to help us better understand motivation factors. The following literature reviews support this hypothesis.
To give historical background into the topic, it is necessary to see what research has already been done to understand why one would go out of their way and protest.
From a societal perspective, reasons for protest originally started with very traditional causes. It was determined that people engage in protest activities to express their grievances. The participants do this in an attempt to correct a deprivation or perceived injustice (Berkowitz, 1972). As time went on, studies blossomed into something much more complex and scholars added more factors intertwining a mix of emotions, group-based anger, and shared grievances, which all translates into group-group-based protest
participation (Van Stekelenberg, Klandermans, 2010). More recently, identity has played a crucial role as well, where primarily one group may feel an unjustified inequality to other people. They collectively choose to protest to try and express their grievances and hope to be heard and get these inequalities redressed. Common highlighted examples can
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include gay rights, police brutality against African Americans, and pro-open border immigration rights groups in the United States. In each of these cases, one group tries to bring attention to what they perceive as an injustice and hope to bring about a meaningful change. This theorizes that identity and grievances work together to build up group-based anger, which gives it motivational strength. This motivational strength is then used as energy towards their movement and its ultimate goals.
One key theory to further explain protest support through a student’s environment is abeyance structures (Taylor 1989). These help to sustain movements during down time when there are no protests occurring. The protest culture is taught about and preserved in these locations, allowing other students to learn about its significance. By keeping this cultural identity during protest waves, abeyance structures play a crucial role in bringing out many people to support measures and add to the campus’ legacy. To look at it in another way, this is something innate within one’s environment that works to motivate the students by keeping them engaged before a particular event happens. These students are prone to protest due to the education factors that have already been established in them by the abeyance structure. When an event does finally happen, there is already an arsenal of students ready to protest and support various causes that pertain to what they have been taught. Abeyance structures do not need to be anything tangible, it can also be abstract (Sawyers and Meyer, 1999). As long as it preserves a way of thinking and can educate others attracting them into this network, it can be classified as such. Therefore, friends, family beliefs, clubs in school, teachers, and even social media can all be categorized as abeyance structures. This paper will identify certain factors that can be labeled as abeyance structures that push students to protest.
Despite these reasons that push students to protest, it is not applicable to everyone.
Abeyance structures can work negatively as well and discourage students from protesting.
In addition, not everyone can get sucked into an abeyance structure so easily. According to threshold models, all people are rational actors with individual preferences
(Granovetter, 1978). Some people may have a low threshold and therefore be the first to protest. For one to join in the protest and follow the first person’s lead, everyone must have a low threshold of one or less. If everyone had a high threshold, there would only be one lone protestor with no one else. After a while, he may give up if no one else will join.
In terms of abeyance structures, this model demonstrates that all students can still make up their own mind and choose what they want to do. But there are some students that will become influenced from factors of their surrounding environment. Part of this study is
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also to find these people influenced by abeyance structures and understand the criteria that made them join.
Another issue to be explored is the social media during protests, which was widely used during the Sunflower Movement. Social media is a common tool used in today’s wired world, which can also work to influence people as it quickly spreads information to many different people. This may be good for protests initially and definitely raises awareness, but it is actually a double-edged sword (Tufecki, 2014). Among one reason is that governments have caught up and can now censor certain forms of media. In addition this social media may have made activism weaker than before. After one event happens, everyone jumps on the bandwagon to protest, but the energy dies out very soon once netizens become preoccupied with other news. During the past, however, it took many years to successfully network and build an infrastructure. Although it did mean that change would take longer to occur, an organization taking years to build was arguably much more lasting and powerful. In terms of the Sunflower Movement, we will see the effect that social media had on students in university and if this actually did give them a quick reaction, but down the line, they grew tired of being inundated with the same stories and chose to do other things. With the quick speeds that information flows on social media, it could have proven influential in getting people out. This new element may have added students who are not very passionate about protesting, but went anyway due information posted by friends. Trying to measure this social media aspect as a motivating factor is something that will be uncovered in this research.
There are also many other practical reasons why students frequently get involved in protests. To begin with, university students are at an age where they are starting to develop their political identities and beliefs (Corrigall, 2012). New students to the college scene are inundated with new information about the world, and may therefore be more inclined towards consciousness raising and ideological appeals in the form of abeyance structures (Van Dyke, 2012). In addition to this flood of new minds getting together wanting to impact the world in a positive light, the campus environment itself plays as a catalyst role in a new setting of peers and a culture holding similar values.
Among various means, friends, social networks, and perhaps teachers all work together holding similar views and supporting similar causes urging students to get involved and make a difference in the world. As a result, college campuses have been a very common area for protests to occur, inevitably playing a key role in the process.
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Even today, if one were to visit a select few campuses across the globe, they are very likely to encounter some form of student activism or another. It is not simply that campus locations themselves are alluring for protestors, but within these campuses lie a very fabric, where students’ temperaments are collectively gathered to express their grievances. Student protest is now inseparably part of the larger college campus landscape and culture. College students have been some of the most likely members of society to protest because they are more biographically available (Snow, Zurcher and Ekland-Olsen 1980). Students are free from most constraints others have in society: most do not have children they must attend to, most do not work full-time where they can leave unpunished; breaks in their class schedule allow them to come and go as they please, and most importantly of all, they have the luxury of skipping each class. Because of the lack of consequences for participating in contrast to other sections of society, the opportunity cost of joining is low and therefore, they can be fully committed to protest efforts (McAdam 1988).
Yet, that is not to say that at all universities there lies a well-established habit for students to protest at every chance. In fact, each campus is made up of different variables that each work in its own way to motivate students to protest. Depending on a school’s student makeup, or its demographics, we can hopefully try to reason through its campus culture and understand its willingness to protest. Namely, highly selective universities and those with a history of protest action are the first to protest (Van Dyke 1998). It is common to see student protests always happening at these schools, all the while it may seen as taboo to participate at other more politically conservative locations. In the United States for example, UC Berkeley, a highly selective university on the West Coast fits the historical cultural aspects, and demographically as increasingly non-religious (Bayer, Astin, Boruch, 1970). In terms of its history, plenty of events played through during the 1960’s up until now. Throughout the campus, lectures, buildings, coffee houses all play homage to these events. As a result, the university is built up around and prides itself on its protest culture. It is these abeyance structures that allow for a well sustained and robust activist culture. When time comes for a new concerted effort towards protest occurs, the constant flow of persuaded students are keen to resort to protest as a means to get their demands met, and continue to fill the role of its former students (Taylor 1989).
In schools that are more conservative and religious, however, students tend to be more agreeably satisfied with the way things are going, and are therefore less inclined to protest.
In addition, the abeyance structures and historical aspects of protest are not found. The
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remarkably different cultures and demographics at each university has a profound impact on the students’ way of thinking, which make them resort to markedly different tactics when problems in society arise.
Students taking such an active role on these societal matters can be looked upon retrospectively in many instances from the Vietnam War, to very recently during the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011, and the Sunflower and Umbrella Movements of 2014, which took place in Taiwan and Hong Kong, respectively. The energy behind each of these protest movements were maintained by the large amount of people behind the movement, many of which were university students. Looking at the data, the presence of university students can be described as over-representative. Rates of participation among younger adults, especially those currently enrolled in university, are significantly higher than their respective numbers in society as a whole. For example, university students made up 24% of all protestors during the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York (Milkman 2013). Large university student protest involvement numbers during protests is indeed not an anomaly, but a common occurrence. This brings us to ponder several questions regarding the Sunflower Movement: What are the factors that motivate students to feel so compelled to get involved? And why did some students get so fervently involved, while others sat on their hands and stayed back?
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Chapter 3