Table 2 - uploaded by Alper Yagci
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
Established wisdom is sceptical of direct linkages between economic hardship and contentious mobilization. Occupy protests seem to constitute an anomaly in this regard by their very existence, but factors associated with these events have not been investigated yet. This study of 398 self-designated Occupy protests across 180 countries finds that th...
Context in source publication
Similar publications
Background: All-cause mortality is a global indicator of the overall health of the population, and its relation to the macro economy is thus of vital interest. The main aim was to estimate the short-term and the long-term impact of macroeconomic change on all-cause mortality. Variations in the unemployment rate were used as indicator of temporary f...
Citations
... Prior studies indicate that economic transformation contributes to the formation of collective actions. Under the sway of neoliberal globalization, structural adjustment and austerity programmes saw citizens' living conditions deteriorate, causing the rise of unemployment and social inequalities (Fominaya 2014;Yagci 2017). Chronic youth unemployment and income inequality, for instance, triggered the Arab Spring. ...
While many scholarly works are concerned with how social protests promote democra�tization, this article addresses the causally reverse question: how democratization shapes
the landscape of street protests. We use a unique database of 31 years of protest events
in Taiwan, a smooth and successful case of authoritarianism-to-democracy transition,
to engage in a dialogue with political transition theory, the institutionalization thesis
and networked movement theory. The logistic regression analysis indicates that protest
violence persists under consolidated democracy, but it is marginalized. We find an indirect
effect from the growth of social movement organizations that foster the adaptation of
festive and performative tactics, which are less confrontational in nature. Politicians’
involvement, however, remains a constant source of disruptiveness. Our conclusion of
contentious institutionalization finds that late-democratizing countries also gravitate
towards becoming a ‘social movement society’ as advanced democracies do, but in a
highly compressed period of time
... Moreover, the fact that the distribution of inequality may be predominantly observed in the horizontal or the vertical axes, or at the intersection of both, is relevant in the sense that vertical inequality rarely has an agglutinating social effect (Otsby, 2013). For example, the 2011 Occupy Wall-Street movement was hotly debated precisely because it was anomalous (Yagci, 2017). In contrast, it is horizontal inequality which usually gains social relevance and stimulates political discontent, since it leads to the perception that the economic scarcities experienced are the result of discrimination against the group of belonging. ...
Developmental psychologists have become increasingly interested in adolescents' thinking on economic inequality. Not surprisingly, most of this research has been conducted with samples from the United States, a paradigmatic example of a Global North region. It is therefore a potentially restrictive approach, given the diversity of manifestations of inequality around the world. In this work, we draw on data on adolescent thinking on social inequality in the Global North alongside comparable emerging data from Argentina, and consider similarities and differences, as well as possible associations between young people's thinking and experiences with the different ways in which economic inequality can be expressed. Finally, we conclude by reflecting on how the analysis conducted here can inform the agenda of developmental psychologists.
... Instead, inequality perceptions and unfairness evaluations are crucial to mobilize people toward reaching a more just society (Oxendine, 2019;Willis et al., 2022). Similarly, the willingness to participate in protest and collective actions is driven by citizens' outrage and unfair evaluations rather than objective inequalities (Ortiz et al., 2022;Yagci, 2017). Indeed, despite the reduction of economic inequality in LA over the last years, protests increased because of people's injustice assessment (Justino & Martorano, 2019). ...
Book chapter to be published in "Social Unrest in Latin America".
... Available data demonstrate that inequality has been on the rise since 1980 or stabilized at high levels across all continents (e.g., Alvaredo et al., 2018). On the other hand, since the global financial crisis in 2007-08 and a worldwide economic downturn, the world has seen a rise in high-profile political protests, starting with Occupy Wall Street in the US, and subsequently spawning hundreds of similar occupy protests around the world (Yagci, 2017). In a lot of these protests, the role of the economy, inequality, as well as wealth's unjustified influence on politics loom large, as exemplified by slogans such as "1% versus 99%" and "We are the 99%". ...
Income inequality has long been suggested as a crucial factor in determining political participation. This study focuses on the case of Hong Kong, a city with notoriously high level of inequality. To examine the effect of inequality on participation, we construct a novel District Income Inequality dataset that estimates inequality at the local district level, providing a more nuanced and accurate analysis of the level of inequality experienced by individuals on a daily basis, instead of the region-wide situation. By focusing on the election-to-election change in district-level inequality, it is found that inequality depresses participation in legislative elections. The results are also robust at the individual-level, with survey data demonstrating that people living in districts with higher inequality were less likely to vote.
... Research on protest events using a count variable typically applies a Negative Binomial Regression (NBR) to deal with the over-dispersion of non-zeros. Or scholars rely on a mixed-NBR approach (e.g., Zero Inflated NBR) to model the zeros and the positive event counts separately (Su, 2015;Yagci, 2017). Alternatively, authors apply a negative binomial with fixed or random effects regression to acknowledge variation over time (van Weezel, 2016;Costello et al., 2015). ...
The literature considers nonviolent protests among the most important predictors of transitions towards democracy and democratic reforms. This study addresses the conditionsmaking countries more likely to experience nonviolent instead of violent forms of protest. While the literature emphasizes economic and political predictors of protest at the country level, we expand the study of nonviolent-vs-violent protest by incorporating cultural predictors. To do so, we use a newly developed time-pooled cross-sectional database covering an established set of orientations from the World Values Survey, known as “emancipative values”. Estimating the prevalence of these values at the country level as a time-varying predictor of nonviolent-vs-violent protests, we present the first comprehensively longitudinal analysis of the determinants of protests. Taking into account time-varying unobserved heterogeneity, persistence, the excess number of zeros and over-dispersion in protest event data, we find that emancipative values are a significant and positive predictor of the countries’ nonviolent protest levels, yet not violent protest levels.
... Economic inequality is widely considered to be among the defining policy issues of our time. In the United Kingdom (UK), recent years have seen economic disparities become the focus of much interest from both members of the public and policymakers, for example giving rise to the Occupy London movement in 2011 (Haldane, 2012;Yagci, 2017), and to the foundation of the UK Wealth Tax commission in 2020 (Advani, Chamberlain, et al., 2020). The widespread interest in the topic of economic inequality reflects the fact that both income and wealth are distributed relatively unequally in the UK. ...
I develop a novel, geographically granular measure of economic inequality in the UK based on data covering tens of millions of residential properties. The size of this data allows me to describe and understand the consequences of local inequality in the UK for the first time. The first paper in my thesis explores patterns of local economic inequality, both contemporary levels and changes over the last couple decades. The paper also examines whether salient features of the local environment affect people’s perceptions of economic inequality. Across two surveys, I find that discrepancies in housing quality are indeed a salient aspect affecting people’s perceptions. I then examine the determinants of inequality at different spatial resolutions, from the city down to the neighbourhood level. I find that local composition of skills, housing tenure, and amenities are all important factors. The third, fourth and fifth papers in my thesis examine the consequences of local inequality for a number of important individual and group behaviours. First, I examine whether local inequality affects pro-social spending, providing new insight into a question that has produced conflicting findings. Across two studies covering the US and UK, I find that local inequality interacts positively with income – higher income individuals are more generous in areas of higher inequality, probably because they come into contact with poorer individuals more often. Second, in a paper co-authored with Thiago Oliveira, I explore whether variation in neighbourhood-level inequality in London affects the prevalence of police stop and search behaviour. We find a positive relationship, supporting criminological theories on police behaviour and social order maintenance. Finally, combining data on economic inequality with data on local ethnic composition from the UK census, I examine whether patterns of residential diversity and segregation affects political behaviour. Using Brexit as a case study, I find strong evidence in support of contact rather than conflict theory – neighbourhood economic and social diversity reduces support for Brexit, but the opposite is true for segregation.
... In our age of globalization and online media, significant events seldom remain "local," with the world paying close attention through different channels. Politics is no exception: to name just a few examples, the Occupy Wall Street movement spawned hundreds of occupy protests around the world (Yagci, 2017); the Arab Spring was nicknamed "Twitter Revolution"; polls on President Trump's popularity are regularly conducted around the world. This study tackles an important, but seldom asked (much less comprehensively answered), question: How does physical presence affect one's views toward ongoing events? ...
Objective
In this article, we explore the seldom studied concept of “distant participation,” defined as the experience of social movements (such as receiving information from online media) from overseas. Online media may affect people's political attitudes, but how people use online media is also contingent upon their political attitudes.
Method
We take advantage of a natural experiment to deal with this endogenous selection problem. Our treatment group consists of college students who happened to join a short‐term overseas exchange program during the Umbrella Movement, which had an unexpectedly large turnout in Hong Kong. These students had a different mode of participation in the event from their peers physically in Hong Kong. The experience, including intensive exposure to online media, changed their media consumption habits, and hence their political attitudes.
Results
We find that the treatment group is more likely to report using online media to obtain news. They also have a stronger sense of political efficacy and significantly weaker national identity. We, however, find no significant difference between the treatment and control groups regarding civic and political participation.
Conclusion
This study provides a rare contribution to the study of the effect of online media by tackling the problem of selection. The concept of distant participation should also be given more attention given the ease of population flow and technological advancement nowadays.
... The aim of the protestors was to denounce inequality and corrupting influence of the '1%' on politics and in so doing, sought to highlight that the financial sector's malfeasance had not been met with an adequate policy response. Even though it was already late in the year, 'Occupy' was subsequently found as the 'most commonly used English word on the internet and in print' over 2011 (see Yagci 2017). To get a more comprehensive picture of the citizen response to the financial crisis, it is necessary to understand the extent and nature of the public support for this movement. ...
Within the literature on financial governance a key question is why the 2008 financial crisis did not elicit a stronger regulatory reaction than it did – the ‘post-crisis stasis’ puzzle. We explore a neglected dimension of this puzzle: public attitudes toward financial regulation. Using a variety of survey data of the US public we find that there was persistent support for stronger financial regulation following the crisis, even support for radical reform in some instances, and support continued even after regulatory reform had been enacted. Despite such general sentiment, however, at nearly every stage public attitudes were highly conditional on partisan affiliation – a hugely consequential detail that meant that demand for reform was not channelled into more stringent policy but rather into a highly partisan, status quo protecting political machinery. Our analysis challenges notions of US public attitudes as either conservative in orientation or placated through modest reform, but also highlights the importance of domestic political constraints in shaping financial reform options despite majoritarian support for more robust reform.
Protest movements that reject political parties are often considered marginal or ineffective due to their hostility toward conventional politics. However, we argue that partisan actors can use protestors’ anti-partisan frames to improve their own competitive positions, often leading to disruptive reconfigurations of party politics. In the post-2008 global protest wave, partisan actors redirected symbolic challenges to their own legitimacy toward field competitors, contributing to the emergence of new factions, parties, coalitions, and populist leadership. We consider why partisan strategies varied across 12 countries, arguing that symbolic deflection was channeled by the institutional structures of local “field architectures.” First, we use proxy measures to map associations between partisan field architectures and political outcomes. Then we use narrative case studies to identify four pathways by which antipartisan contention was channeled through party-movement interaction. Our analysis shows how symbolic dimensions of field legitimation interact with institutional structures in struggles over field dominance.
The contributions of people’s morale as a future-oriented quality of life through their intergenerational respect and support for the societal system to furnish democracy, freedom, law, order, and prosperity rather than opposition to government is plausible but questionable and uncharted. Their plausibility rests on structural-functionalist theory positing that the family and societal system are functional structures. The study examines the contributions with a random-sample survey of 1,252 Hong Kong Chinese adults with living parents. Results reveal the indirect contribution of intergenerational respect to morale through supporting the societal system for liberty and security and non-opposition to government. The contributions held across sociodemographic conditions. Implications follow to promote intergenerational support and support for the societal system to sustain morale.
