Channels of Democracy? The impact of Voting and Social Media Political Participation on Illegal Protest

Previous literature has suggested that political participation is a cumulative process and that individuals who are politically involved in one form of political participation also tend to use other forms and venues to engage with politics (Oser et al., 2013). However, not all forms of political participation are legal or even based on democratic norms. The increasing political mobilization of society has also brought up a greater number of violent protests on the streets (Carless, 2021), and even spurring unlawful protest actions on the web (van Laer & van Aelst, 2010). This puzzle between political socialization through previous participation experiences and undemocratic repertoires drives the following research question: which prior experiences of political participation explain the engagement in unlawful political activities, and more specifically in illegal protest? In order to answer this question, we build on three strains of research—political behavior, confrontational social movements and political communication. We argue that, following a pattern of radicalization (Bosi & Della Porta, 2012; Della Porta, 2018), some unconventional but legal experiences of participation do increase the likelihood of engaging in illegal protest in the future (DiGrazia, 2014; Gainous et al., 2015; Gavray et al., 2012), while other more institutionalized forms of participation reduce or moderate the likelihood of frequently being involved in unlawful political actions (Fatke & Freitag, 2013; Gallego & Oberski, 2012). Moreover, we highlight a particular form of online political participation that, in our view, deserve to be considered separately from others forms of e-participation: this is social media political participation. We argue that this mode of participation is substantially different from other forms digital participation, and that it is particularly relevant for understanding the antecedents of todays’ frequent illegal protestors. To test first the empirical relevance of the separate modes of participation and later the different effects of these different forms of participation on illegal protest we rely on data from a two-wave panel survey gathered in the United States. To verify the empirical sustainability of these theoretical propositions, we run a Confirmatory Factor Analysis to test whether there are relevant and separate forms of political participation in our sample. Second, we perform cross-sectional, lagged and auto-regressive OLS regression models to isolate the effects of every form of political participation on illegal protest. Third, we run three separate OLS regressions (cross-sectional, lagged and auto-regressive) to test whether institutional forms of participation (i.e. voting) moderates the effect of non-conventional forms of participation (i.e. social media political participation) on illegal protest. Throughout the three models we find that social media political participation is positively associated with frequent illegal protesting, while voting is negatively associated with unlawful protesting. Moreover, we observe a divergent positive relationship over time between social media political participation and illegal protest where voting is a contributory moderator. That is, those who tend to vote more infrequently in general and local elections, but largely engage in social media political participation are the group of people who are most likely to engage in illegal protesting activities.