Social Movement Participation over Time: An Ego-Network Approach to Micro-Mobilization

Abstract

This study focuses upon the relationship between personal networks and the participation of individuals in a social movement over time, a rarity in the social movement literature, which has mostly used cross-sectional designs to explore this topic. Objectives of the research include empirically documenting some of the mechanisms that underlie the effects of network ties on social movement participation, examining the explanatory power of an ego-network model of individual participation in social movements over time, and examining whether network effects on activism are spurious, once past activism is controlled. Data were collected through two waves of a panel survey administered to members of three formal environmental organizations in Victoria, British Columbia in 1992 and 1998. These organizations were central to the British Columbia wilderness preservation movement. Multiple regression and path analysis are utilized to examine the relative importance of network degree versus network range, as well as frequency of communication and level of movement identification, for explaining level of social movement participation. Results show distinct effects of network degree, network range, communication, and identification on level of activism. An additional finding is that network (and network process) variables have effects on new activism that are independent of the effects of past activism. A theoretical discussion considers the implications of the stage of the cycle of protest and biographical availability in influencing these processes.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 105 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.