The effect of exposure to digital appeals to participate in collective action posted by influentials on protest information sharing: Evidence from Japan and South Korea
| Author | Matthew D Jenkins |
| DOI | 10.1177/20578911211000854 |
| Published date | 01 June 2022 |
| Date | 01 June 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Research Articles on East Asian Politics |
The effect of exposure to
digital appeals to
participate in collective
action posted by
influentials on protest
information sharing:
Evidence from Japan and
South Korea
Matthew D Jenkins
Gyeongsang National University, Republic of Korea
Abstract
Contemporary collective action theories put large horizontal digitally connected networks at the
center of mass political action. They posit that information sharing among ordinary social media
users makes possible new forms of rapid mass political action. However, recent research has
shown that influential individuals can play a number of key roles in facilitating networked political
action in seemingly leaderless movements. Still, the role of influential individuals in stimulating
protest information sharing on social media is an important aspect of networked collective action
that remains understudied. This study seeks to address this. Specifically, it investigates the fol-
lowing question: does exposure to appeals to engage in protest increase individuals’ motivation to
share protest information? Drawing on evidence from an original survey experiment, this study
shows that digital appeals to engage in collective action posted by influential individuals do elicit an
increase in motivation to share the appeal. However, this result obtains only for Korean
respondents, whereas influential appeals appear to have no effect on Japanese respondents. I argue
that this difference is in part a function of different citizenship norms in the two countries, and the
corresponding effects on social network dynamics. Preliminary analysis supports this interpreta-
tion, but further investigation is warranted.
Corresponding author:
Matthew D Jenkins, Gyeongsang National University, Jinju, Republic of Korea.
Email: mjenkins@gnu.ac.kr
Asian Journal of Comparative Politics
ªThe Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/20578911211000854
journals.sagepub.com/home/acp
2022, Vol. 7(2) 376–395
Research Articles on ast Asian Politics
Keywords
digital media, East Asia, influentials, information sharing, protest
Introduction
The increasing frequency of large horizontal pro test movements has given rise to theories of
collective action that posit ostensibly leaderless horizontal networks at the central mobilizing force
of collective action (e.g. Bennett and Segerberg, 2013; Earl and Kimport, 2011). In these theories,
self-organizing networks of ordinary citizens connected through digital media and motivated by a
“culture of sharing” subsume the role formerly played by movement leaders and elites (Castells,
2012: 232).
However, there is mounting evidence that elites within these networks play an outsized role in
ostensibly leaderless movements. For example, influential individuals in a network can use their
influence to set the movement’s political agenda and stitch together disparate social networks in a
way that fits theirpersonal goals (Poell et al., 2016; Trott,2018). This strand of researchsuggests the
flow of information from influential individuals to ordinary digital media users is a far more
important determinant of the success and shape of digitally networked collective action than some
theories have acknowledged. Given that networked collective action depends on the sharing of
information about the action on social media—such as appeals to engage in action, or logistical
information—we might then ask if collective action appeals from influential individuals, like pol-
iticians orlocal community leaders, motivate ordinary usersto share collective actioninformation, as
the studiesabove would suggest. This constitutes the main research question ofthe present study, and
it is an important questionbecause it bears on the debate over the extentto which digitally networked
collective action represents a fundamental departure from traditional organization-based collective
action, as well as elucidating a possible mechanism of collective action diffusion.
The second research question of this study concerns cross-national variation in the effect of the
appeals of influentials on collective action information sharing. The literature has tacitly assumed
that social media and related affordances are used more or less in the same way across all contexts,
or at least in the developed democracies. Yet, networked action—whether it is crowd driven or
elite driven—is a contagion phenomenon that conforms to threshold models of human behavior, so
the diffusion of collective action information depends upon the operation of social network
dynamics, which can vary across network types and national contexts (Jenkins, 2019, 2020; Siegel,
2009). It is possible that the effect of influential appeals also varies across contexts, since indi-
viduals are embedded in a larger social context that might in turn moderate their motivation to
share the appeal on social media. This is important because it has implications for the boundaries of
networked collective action. Whereas existing theories are optimistic about the potential for social
media to have a transformative effect on democratic societies around the world in that it provides a
solution to the collective action dilemma, examining this mechanism of mobilization in a com-
parative context puts this optimism to test and aids in the search for moderating factors that might
inhibit or amplify the type of network effects that drive the diffusion of collective action.
I investigate these questions empirically through an analysis of the results of an original survey
experiment conducted in Japa n and South Korea. The results of the experime nt indicate that
exposure to simulated influential appeals increases Korean respondents’ motivation to share the
appeal as compared to respondents exposed to neutral, informative posts. However, the treatment
is not statistically significant among Japanese respondents. I argue that this difference is in part a
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Jenkins
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