‘Coming together to awaken our democracy’: Examining precursors of emergent social identity and collective action among activists and non-activists in the 2019–2020 ‘Chile despertó’ protests

By integrating the insights from social identity research on collective action, this article examines the social-psychological mechanisms behind the emergence of the 2019–20 ‘Chile despertó’ social movement, a major Latin American revolt against the government's price hikes. Using survey data collected among Chilean activists (N = 549) and non-activists (i.e., members of broader society, N = 234), we analyse two major explanatory collective action frameworks: that is, the social identity model of collective action (SIMCA) and the encapsulation model of the social identity of collective action (EMSICA). Multi-group SEM with latent variables revealed that the EMSICA was slightly better suited as compared to SIMCA to explain collective action on behalf of newly formed collective identities. As concerns prosocial disobedience, these attitudes predicted collective action intentions indirectly through social identification among both activists and non-activists. The indirect effects of moral outrage were found to be more pronounced in non-activists, whereas perceived collective efficacy had stronger direct mobilizing effects among activists. The discussion highlights the importance of studying individuals' prosocial disobedience attitudes within social identity models of collective action. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.