Participation and non-participation in climate demonstrations. What factors explain why some individuals take to the streets while others do not?

The increasing public awareness of the threats of climate change have contributed to a new wave of citizen mobilization across the globe pushing for the rapid reduction of carbon emissions. This paper contributes to studies of environmental movements and climate justice demonstrations by investigating what factors that make some individuals to take part in climate protests, while others abstain participation despite their worries about the climate. Scholars in political participation and social movement studies are still puzzled about whether it is support for the cause, socio-demographic factors, membership in organizations or social networks, or factors relating to the political environment that primarily explains why people are mobilized to the streets. In this paper, we discuss three types of groups: those being actually mobilized to climate protests, those that are sympathetic to climate protests but do not participate in them, and those that are unsympathetic to climate protests. A comparison of these groups allows us to identify what types of factors that explain individuals’ participation, or non-participation, in climate protests. Previous research on protest participation have either used protest survey data or general population surveys. While protest surveys are often focused on specific types of protests (such as climate protests), they say nothing about individuals never showing up for the protest. General population surveys, on the other hand, are good sources of data for comparing participants with non-participants, but almost never ask questions about participation in specific types of protests (such as climate protests), and often generate too few cases of protest participants to make more robust statistical analyses. Our approach combines these two types of data, by “pooling” two datasets based on two random and representative samples: one from a public survey to Swedish residents that specifically asks questions about participation in climate strikes (n=1,529), and one from protest surveys conducted at climate strike protests in Sweden (n=929). Both were conducted in 2019. The public survey study targeted Swedish residents living in the three biggest cities (Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö) and Sweden at large. The protest survey was carried out in the same cities and followed a systematic random sampling strategy. The pooled dataset contains responses from 2,458 individuals. The paper use binary logistic regression analyses to investigate which factors (e.g., socio-demographic, organizational or social network, political ideology) that increase the likelihood of (1) participating compared to not participating in climate protests, (2) participating compared to not participating while still expressing willingness to participate in climate protests, and (3) not participating while still expressing willingness to participate compared to being unsympathetic to climate protests. Our preliminary results indicate that factors shown relevant in previous studies on protests also matters in this study – e.g., socio-demographic, ideological, organizational factors – but also that specific grievances and attitudes related to environmental concerns have a large impact on individuals’ likelihood to take part in climate protests or showing willingness to participate in them.