Efficacy of peaceful and violent protests as predictors of normative and non-normative collective action: Catalonia 2019 (La eficacia de la protesta pacífica y de la violenta como predictores de la acción colectiva normativa y no normativa: Cataluña 2019)

Abstract

To demonstrate the value of operationalizing the efficacy of action beliefs in terms of peaceful and violent actions in understanding why people engage in different forms of collective action (CA), we conducted a study (N = 211 students) in Catalonia in 2019, during the massive protests after the Spanish Supreme Court ruling on the Catalan leaders. We tested six models differing regarding the operationalization of CA and inclusion of group identity and perceived injustice as control factors. The role of the efficacy of peaceful protests was model-dependent. Conversely, we found evidence in favour of the efficacy of violent protests as a robust predictor of intentions to participate in non-normative CA — participants perceiving violence as effective exhibited stronger intentions to participate in non-normative CA. Furthermore, no predictor other than the efficacy of violent protests predicted the variance of non-normative CA isolated from the variance of normative CA, implying that studying the perceived efficacy of different types of CA could improve our understanding of why people engage in different forms of CA.