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Does Learning About Protest Abroad Inform Individuals’ Attitudes About Protest at Home? Experimental Evidence from Egypt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2021

Steven Brooke Open the ORCID record for Steven Brooke [Opens in a new window]  and
Mazen Hassan Open the ORCID record for Mazen Hassan [Opens in a new window]
Steven Brooke
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, US
Mazen Hassan*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt
*
*Corresponding author. Email: m.hassan@feps.edu.eg
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Abstract

The Arab Spring revived interest into how contentious mobilization diffuses across time and space. We evaluate individual-level attitudinal implications of this literature through laboratory experiments with 681 Egyptian college students. Across two separate experiments, primes based on recent protests in Tunisia, Syria and the Sudan reveal a limited ability to shift respondents’ retrospective views of the Arab Spring, the efficacy of protest to achieve political change, Egypt's perceived domestic situation vis-à-vis its neighbours and a personal willingness to assume risk in a computer game-based behavioural extension. Our findings imply the need to continue to improve theorizing and empirically testing key implications from the diffusion literature.

Keywords

diffusiondemocratizationcontentious politicsArab Springexperiment
Type
Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , July 2022 , pp. 428 - 445
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Government and Opposition Limited

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