A Survey Experiment on the Role of Protest Brokers in Elite-Mobilized Protest

Protest brokers – intermediaries who connect elites desiring mobilization with communities of potential protesters – play an important role in the organization of collective action. The literature so far, however, has been based on an underlying assumption that elites find it difficult to organize collective action in their absence, without fully interrogating this claim. In this paper, I test the degree to which this assumption holds, using a novel survey experiment fielded to over 3,000 local councillors in South Africa. I find that local councillors are indeed aware of the important role played by protest brokers, and believe that it will be significantly harder to organize local-level protest action in their absence – a belief that helps to explain when and where we see elite-mobilized protest taking place. Follow-up questions probe the drivers and consequences of this belief further, with important implications for our understanding of collective action.