Anger and Means: What Drives Political Action

According to the standard socio-economic status model, people participate in politics when they have certain personal resources, such as finances and skills to engage. More recently, a few studies on political corruption have proposed that the spread of malfeasance may also generate psychological motivations in regard to voter turnout. This paper undertakes an empirical investigation of whether rage at endemic corruption or resource availability explains better individual decisions for participation in non-electoral forms of political action. Macro- and micro-level indicators of the two central independent variables are used to compare their relative impact on a set of activities beyond the electoral arena. Since participation in some of these forms involves more costs than in other, I look at two groups of activities—legally authorized (association membership, petitions, and authorized protests), and unauthorized (unofficial strikes and occupation of buildings). Methodologically, multivariate regression techniques are used to test several participation models on cross-national East European data from the World Values Survey and from a 2014 post-election poll in Hungary.