Untangling the differential drivers of protest participation: survey evidence from Extinction Rebellion’s arrestable and lawful actions (2019 and 2023)

Broad-based climate movements are important shapers and signallers of public demand for efficacious policies to tackle climate change and, through demonstrative and disruptive action, creating windows for policy change. Here, we use a unique protest survey dataset to develop a comparative framework for understanding the drivers of protest participation in two tactically different major climate protests in London staged by the same organisation. Crucially, these protests take place at different phases of the policy window and have different action premises: Extinction Rebellion’s (XR) ‘arrestable’ protests in 2019, and its much more conventional and lawful actions in 2023. By focusing on action design we are able to compare across cases and contrast the drivers of participation in arrestable and lawful actions respectively. By disaggregating variables through bivariate and multivariate analysis, we develop an authoritative approach to the drivers of protest, teasing out the respective importance of different elements of biographical, structural and political availability. We find that, aside from part-time working, biographical availability is not a reliable predictor of participation in the different forms of protest. In contrast, structural availability, and bonding capital in particular, matters more. XR’s arrestable 2019 protests, which had significant policy influence, successfully mobilised more strongly committed participants than its lawful 2023 protests.