Survey Experiment on Elite Protest Organization in South Africa

The literature suggests that protest brokers – intermediaries who connect elites desiring mobilization with communities of potential protesters – play an important role in the organization of protest (Lockwood 2022). While the role that these individuals play in protest organization is undoubtedly important, however, the evidence supporting their role has so far been primarily illustrative, and more is needed to fully test and understand the role that they play, and the impact they have. In this experiment, I test a central assumption of the protest broker argument – that the presence or absence of protest brokers affects the ability of elites to organize protest. Specifically, this survey experiment will test whether the availability of protest brokers affects views of mobilization success among local councilors in South Africa. It will do this by presenting local councilors with a vignette in which the availability of a broker is varied (among other factors), and testing whether this affects how easy elites think it would be to arrange protest in communities. Follow up questions in the rest of the survey will then probe the role of brokers further.