The ERC grant, starting in 2017, has allowed us to conduct surveys with a large number of students every year, both before and after the pro-democracy marches on July 1st, from 2017 until 2019.
First, we aimed to obtain a full and comprehensive picture of the social, economic, and ideological background of politically active students, and to understand how these traits and beliefs map into pro-democratic activism. We elicited preferences (providing cover in case students would not respond truthfully to open questions), beliefs, and second-order beliefs (beliefs about others' beliefs and preferences). We measured classic psychological preferences ("big 5 traits") and economic preferences (such as time discounting, risk aversion, reciprocity, inequality aversion). The panel survey has allowed us to investigate these traits in every yearly round of interviews on a broad number of students (~2000), from 2016 (a pilot wave that was conducted with seed funding) through 2017 and 2018 until 2019.
This data collection has resulted in a publication (“The Fundamental Determinants of Protest Participation”, Journal of Public Economics 2022), in which we compare how the relationships between fundamental economic preferences and activism have changed as the nature and size of the protests changes through time, from the small protests of 2016-2018 to the large-scale ones of 2019. We document how the distribution of fundamental preferences is stable through time and very similar between university students and the broader population, while their relationship with protest participation increases in magnitude in 2019 (suggesting that the overall composition of participants did not change).
Second, we aimed at better understanding the role of information, especially about peers' beliefs and their potential participation in political actions, on one's own political activities. We embedded an experimental component in the regularly scheduled yearly surveys. In a first experiment, we have provided (a random subset of) students information about their peers' plans to attend the upcoming protest march. This allows us to understand whether one's own participation in a movement is a complement or a substitute to other people's participation. Our results point toward a "game" of substitutes, in which students reduce their participation when informed that the planned participation is higher than they expected (and vice versa). The results from this experiment have been published in "Protests as Strategic Games" (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2019).
In the second experiment, we have studied the drivers of sustained political participation — a particularly salient question in the Hong Kong context, with repeated marches every year (this was eventually published as “Persistent Political Engagement” in the American Economic Review: Insights). We have provided students with an indirect monetary incentive, increasing the likelihood to attend the protest march in 2017. We found that this (marginal) incentive did not change students' beliefs and political attitudes. However, one year later, we noticed a higher participation in the political march among the students who received the incentive one year prior. This points to the crucial role of social interactions (making new, politically engaged friends) in determining political activism.
To conclude, we are currently working on two projects (the data collection and analysis has taken place, we are finalizing the write-up). First, using our survey data from Hong Kong and data that we previously collected in Beijing in 2013, we aim to study the selection of elites especially with regard to their background and their preferences, and how students in mainland China and in Hong Kong differ with regards to the broader population in this respect. Second, we have been invited to write a review article about the economics of protest participation, drawing from our findings in the Hong Kong context.
Our research has been received and disseminated widely. Besides resulting in three, high-profile publications, it has been presented, by ether me or my coauthors, in 88 seminars, workshops, or conferences, and has been featured in three broad keynote lectures. It has also been featured in several (mostly Hong Kong-based) news articles, and has inspired a number of follow-up papers adapting the methodology to other contexts. We have organized two high-profile workshops on these topics, one in 2018 (on "Understanding the Demand for Democracy") and one in 2022 (on "Studying Critical Junctures in Real Time").
