Exposure to Scandal-Triggering Media Coverage and Subsequent Participation in Mass Protest: Lessons from the Panama Papers Protest in Iceland, April 2016

Injustice scandals are known triggers of mass mobilization in protest and riots, and when they do mobilization often emerges rapidly and “spontaneously” (Abrams, 2023; Bernburg, 2022; Doherty and Schraeder, 2018). Examples include the Tunisian revolt of 2011 (Breuer et al., 2015; Doherty and Schraeder, 2018), the London riots of 2011 (Kawalerowicz and Biggs, 2015), the Black Lives Matter protest in the United States in 2020 (Kann et al., 2023), and the women’s protest in Iran in 2022 (Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, 2023). In these and many other scandal-triggered mobilizations, the public revelation of morally shocking content rapidly spurs widespread motives for individuals to participate in protest on the given injustice theme. Often such protest incentives emerge even before organized activist groups are able to perform extensive collective action framing, networking, and protest planning. To date, research has examined several major aspects of such episodes, including the role of social media use by activists and the public and the pivotal effects on participation of emerging signals of widespread protest participation by others (Doherty and Schraeder, 2018) and, relatedly, of large-turnout expectations (Bernburg, 2022). However, research has yet to test whether personal and “timely” exposure to such content predicts protest participation in such protests. Given the frequency of scandal-evoked protests, this constitutes a significant limitation in research on protest mobilization. As theorists of collective mobilization (Opp, 2009; Oberschall, 1994) and of the public sphere (Adut, 2008, 2012) have suggested, viewing morally shocking content (e.g., a viral video of police brutality, or the media revelations of corruption) during the moment when many others are exposed to the same content may produce personal outrage coupled with mutual awareness about shared outrage. Accordingly, timely exposure to scandal-triggering content may spur emotional, collective, and social motives to participate in a subsequent protest. This suggestion implies a hypothesis that has rarely been tested directly: timely exposure to scandal-triggering content should be pronouncedly associated with participation in such protest. I test this hypothesis by obtaining reliable survey measurement of the participation of the public in a major wave of mass political protest that suddenly broke out in Iceland within 24 hours from the April 3, 2016, Panama Papers expose. Drawing on a population-representative survey conducted during the waning phase of the protests (N=1001), I estimate that about 57 percent of the citizenry viewed the “Iceland-tailored” coverage when it was aired, and that those did were substantively and significantly more likely to both support and participate in two large protest events in the following days (i.e., on April 4 and April 9). But while these results underscore how timely exposure to morally shocking media content mobilized a public, I emphasize how timely protest planning by a small group of activists was still pivotal to translating shared outrage into protest behavior, as was the shared memory of a historic mobilization that emerged in Iceland on a similar injustice theme only a few years before. The findings have implications for theory of emergence of mass protest.