Affiliation:
1. Department of Political Science and International Relations and the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences University of Geneva Geneva Switzerland
2. Department of Political Science University of Zurich Zurich Switzerland
3. International Relations/Political Science Department The Graduate Institute Geneva Switzerland
4. Institute of Psychology University of Lausanne Lausanne Switzerland
5. Department Of Social And Behavioral Science Birzeit University Birzeit West Bank Palestine
Abstract
AbstractHow does residing in the proximity of surveillance infrastructure—i.e., checkpoints, the separation barrier, and military installations—affect support for cooperative and confrontational forms of collective action? Cooperative actions involve engagement with outgroups to advance the ingroup cause (e.g., negotiations, joint actions, and peace movements), whereas confrontational actions involve unilateral tactics to weaken the outgroup (e.g., boycott, armed resistance). In the context of West Bank and Jerusalem, we combine geo‐coded data on the surveillance infrastructure with a representative survey of the adult population from 49 communities (N = 1,000). Our multilevel analyses show that surveillance does not affect support for confrontational actions but instead decreases support for cooperative actions. Moreover, we identify a new, community‐level mechanism whereby surveillance undermines cooperative actions through weakening inclusive norms that challenge dominant us‐versus‐them perspectives. These effects are empirically robust to various individual‐ and community‐level controls, as well as to the potential of reverse causality and residential self‐selection. Our findings illustrate how cooperative voices and the fabric of social communities become the first casualties of exposure to surveillance. They also speak to the importance of considering structural factors, with broader implications for the socio‐psychological study of collective action.
Funder
Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung
Subject
Political Science and International Relations,Philosophy,Sociology and Political Science,Clinical Psychology,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology,Social Psychology