THE ROLE OF EFFICACY, HOPE, URGENCY AND SUBJECTIVE POLITICAL OPENNESS IN BYSTANDER SUPPORT FOR CONFRONTATIONAL CLIMATE ACTION

Date

2025-8-15

Author

Bağcı, Ece Sezen

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This study examined the factors that influence bystander support for confrontational collective action, a crucial tactic in addressing the climate crisis. While the literature on motivations to join confrontational actions is growing, bystander perceptions remain underexplored. Accordingly, this thesis investigated the role of efficacy, hope, subjective political openness (SPO), and urgency in bystander support for confrontational environmental activism. First, I developed a new multi-item measure to thoroughly assess bystander support. Then, I experimentally manipulated efficacy to determine its impact on support and measured other variables via self-report. The findings revealed that bystander support for confrontational actions was positively related to the perceived urgency of the problem and the efficacy of these tactics and negatively related to the perception of the political context's openness to activism. Additionally, efficacy significantly moderated the relationship between urgency and support, with a stronger positive relationship between urgency and support for individuals in the low efficacy condition. Critically, because manipulation checks indicated that half of the participants did not correctly interpret the core message in manipulation texts, efficacy manipulation did not consistently achieve its intended effect. Nevertheless, these findings held consistently both when efficacy was defined by experimental group assignment for the 228 participants who understood and agreed with the manipulation and by self-reported efficacy for the full sample of 689 participants, except for a nonsignificant moderation in the latter analysis. Ultimately, this study provides important insights into mobilizing bystander support for confrontational environmental activism tactics and especially highlights the role of context-related factors.

Subject Keywords

bystander, confrontational action, support, efficacy

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/115495

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis