‘Nothing to lose or a world to win’: Reconsidering efficacy, legitimacy, political trust and repression in confrontational collective action
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Confrontational collective actions are neither uncontrolled outbursts of initially pacifist resistance nor mere reactions to helplessness and lack of viable political options. Instead, they serve strategically determined purposes within the group, making them perceived as both effective and legitimate. Regardless of whether it is more or less confrontational, examining the role of efficacy and legitimacy of actions that are committed to achieving group goals is crucial for understanding the appeal of collective action strategies. We examined the role of political trust and protest repression in predicting the legitimacy of protest violence and the perceived efficacy of confrontational and non-confrontational collective actions and, in turn, their role in confrontational collective action. Across three correlational studies conducted in Germany, Turkey and the United Kingdom (N = 3833), the legitimacy of protest violence and the efficacy of confrontational tactics were core determinants of confrontational collective actions. While low political trust did not directly predict confrontational action, it predicted heightened protest repression and the legitimacy of protest violence. Our findings challenge the nothing-to-lose hypothesis by demonstrating that confrontational actions are not driven by the low efficacy of non-confrontational strategies or low political trust, and people may perceive both confrontational and non-confrontational actions as similarly effective.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".