Protests as Strategic Games: Experimental Evidence from Hong Kong's Antiauthoritarian Movement*
Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2019 · Davide Cantoni、David Y. Yang、Noam Yuchtman、Y. Jane Zhang
中文摘要
社会科学家长期以来一直将是否参与抗议的决策视为具有策略性的决策，个体是否参与取决于其对他人参与情况的信念。我们在香港持续进行的反威权运动背景下开展了一项情境化实地实验，重新校准个体对他人抗议参与情况的信念。我们以提供激励的方式，询问并获取受试者参与即将举行的抗议的计划，以及他们对他人参与情况的先验信念。在抗议前一天，我们随机向部分受试者提供有关他人抗议参与计划的真实信息，并再次以提供激励的方式，询问并获取他们对抗议参与情况的后验信念。抗议结束后，我们询问受试者的实际参与情况。由此，我们能够识别对他人抗议参与情况的信念向上和向下更新对受试者自身参与情况的因果效应。与近期许多抗议参与模型的假设相反，我们的发现一致支持策略替代性的存在。我们就策略替代性的可能来源提供指引，这些来源可纳入抗议理论模型。
Abstract
Social scientists have long viewed the decision to protest as strategic, with an individual's participation a function of their beliefs about others' turnout.We conduct a framed field experiment that recalibrates individuals' beliefs about others' protest participation, in the context of Hong Kong's ongoing antiauthoritarian movement.We elicit subjects' planned participation in an upcoming protest and their prior beliefs about others' participation, in an incentivized manner.One day before the protest, we randomly provide a subset of subjects with truthful information about others' protest plans and elicit posterior beliefs about protest turnout, again in an incentivized manner.After the protest, we elicit subjects' actual participation.This allows us to identify the causal effects of positively and negatively updated beliefs about others' protest participation on subjects' own turnout.In contrast with the assumptions of many recent models of protest participation, we consistently find evidence of strategic substitutability.We provide guidance regarding plausible sources of strategic substitutability that can be incorporated into theoretical models of protests.