Efficacy, Blame Attribution, and Protest Scope: Findings from a Survey Experiment in South Africa

Similar grievances can motivate different types of protests with some demanding small scale improvements such as better quality sanitation in a neighbourhood and others calling for a change of the system itself. We investigate the role of perceptions of efficacy in shaping support for narrow/precise as compared to broader/systemic protest issue scopes. Our core mechanism, based on findings in the social psychology literature, posits that higher efficacy enables individuals to reappraise the origin of their grievances and attribute blame to broader scope targets, which, in turn, increases preference for broad protest issue scope. To investigate this mechanism, we conduct a survey experiment in two South African townships. We find that individuals asked to recall a successful protest (vs. an unsuccessful one and vs. a control group), are not only more likely to feel powerful and have higher levels of efficacy. They are also more likely to attribute common social grievances to the system rather than lower level culprits and to support protests calling for system change (social inequality) rather than specific policies (service provision). These results can help understanding the stability of social and political systems in the face of high grievances and protest.