Socialized into illegal protest? The impact of voting and social media participation

Building upon previous literature on political behavior, contentious social movements, and political communication, this paper aims to identify which experiences of political participation are associated with illegal protest. Relying on a two-wave panel dataset from the US, we first provide an overview of the main types of political participatory behavior, including social media political engagement. Later, using cross-sectional, autoregressive and fixed effects OLS regressions, we test the different associations of various forms of participation with illegal protest. Overall, we find frequent voting is negatively related to partaking in illegal protest, while social media political participation is consistently, strongly, and positively related to illegal protest, even accounting for potential endogeneity between illegal protest and social media political participation. Furthermore, frequent voting moderates this latter association, so that the relationship between social media political engagement and illegal protest is stronger for rare voters as opposed to frequent voters.