Hot Contention, Cool Abstention

Positive Emotions and Protest Behavior During the Arab Spring

Stephanie Dornschneider

Series in Political Psychology

Provides a novel, micro-level perspective on protest behavior by showing that decision-making during the Arab Spring was based on hot and cool cognitive systems: The hot, "go"-system motivated fast, emotion-based decision-making favoring protest, whereas the cool, "know"-system led to slow and strategic decisions rejecting protest participation
Introduces the important role of positive emotions, particularly hope, solidarity, courage, and pride, complementing the large protest literature on negative emotions of anger, frustration, and moral outrage
Develops an original dataset of ethnographic interviews with participants and non-participants in the Arab Spring, and applies qualitative methods to code the data into 121 reasoning processes related to protest decisions
Establishes a new computational model to systematically analyze large numbers of reasoning processes

Hot Contention, Cool Abstention

Positive Emotions and Protest Behavior During the Arab Spring

Stephanie Dornschneider

Series in Political Psychology

Description

Why did people mobilize for the Arab Spring? While existing research has focused on the roles of authoritarian regimes, oppositional structures, and social grievances in the movement, these explanations fail to address differences in the behavior of individuals, overlooking the fact that even when millions mobilized for the Arab Spring, the majority of the population stayed at home. To investigate this puzzle, this book traces the reasoning processes by which individuals decided to join the uprisings, or to refrain from doing so. Drawing from original ethnographic interviews with protestors and non-protestors in Egypt and Morocco, Dornschneider utilizes qualitative methods and computational modeling to identify the main components of reasoning processes: beliefs, inferences (directed connections between beliefs), and decisions.

Bridging the psychology literature on reasoning and the political science literature on protest, this book systematically traces how decisions about participating in the Arab Spring were made. It shows that decisions to join the uprisings were "hot," meaning they were based on positive emotions, while decisions to stay at home were "cool," meaning they were based on safety considerations. Hot Contention, Cool Abstention adds to the extensive literature on political uprisings, offering insights on how and why movements start, stall, and evolve.

Hot Contention, Cool Abstention

Positive Emotions and Protest Behavior During the Arab Spring

Stephanie Dornschneider

Series in Political Psychology

Chapter 1: An Extraordinary Experience
Chapter 2: Similar States, Opposite Outcomes: Egypt and Morocco
Chapter 3: Identifying Beliefs and Inferences
Chapter 4: Tracing Reasoning Processes
Chapter 5: Hot Contention, Cool Abstention
Chapter 6: Conclusions
Bibliography
Appendices
Appendix 1: The sample
Appendix 2: Beliefs identified by the qualitative analysis
Appendix 3: z-scores
Appendix 4: Minimum sets of beliefs

Hot Contention, Cool Abstention

Positive Emotions and Protest Behavior During the Arab Spring

Stephanie Dornschneider

Series in Political Psychology

Author Information

Stephanie Dornschneider, Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin

Stephanie Dornschneider is Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin. She holds a PhD from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, as well as an MA in International Relations and a Diploma in Middle East Studies from the American University in Cairo.

Hot Contention, Cool Abstention

Positive Emotions and Protest Behavior During the Arab Spring

Stephanie Dornschneider

Series in Political Psychology

From Our Blog

Safety first? Considering protest reasoning 10 years on from the Arab Spring

Could we expect new mass protests to mark the ten-year anniversary of the Arab Spring? New research investigates the cognitive processes underlying the protests, especially how the desire for "safety and stability" impacts the decision to protest or abstain.

Posted on January 25, 2021

Read the blog post