Not all confrontations are accepted equal: A conjoint analysis on attitudes towards protest

Political protest comes in many forms and evolves according to the particular contexts and cultural norms on peaceful coexistence. Peaceful sit-ins and quiet rallies rapidly become normalized forms of action that give way to the more disruptive occupations or intimidating escraches. This is an important challenge for protesters who aim at disrupting daily routines in order to capture public attention and to do so in such a way as to generate public support towards their actions and grievances. It is also a relevant question for assessing public attitudes towards political contention and innovative forms of expressing dissent, considering that preferences for social order may have potential trade-offs with disruptive forms of exercising political rights. This study explores the individual thresholds for accepting public demonstrations of political confrontation. We focus on four attributes of protest events: disruptiveness, lawfulness, violence and divisiveness in order to move forward the study of attitudes towards protest by disentangling the differences of attitudes toward particular attitude object (actors, issues or repertoires) from the particular attributes of events. With high levels of protest action and a rapidly changing context of contention in the recent years in response to austerity policy, Spain is an ideal case for testing varying attributes of protest events. We rely on an online survey representative of the Spanish population in order to test individual preferences and intention to protest in events on austerity issues according to possible combinations of attributes. Respondents make trade-offs by stating preferences over different bundles of attributes and in this way we estimate their support for protest. Differences between attributes and issues show that attitudes towards protest are multidimensional and context-specific. These findings contribute to the literature on attitudes towards contentious politics by disentangling the effects of contextual determinants of attitudes from event-specific traits.