Dynamics of Candlelight Protestors: In Respect of Political Opportunity Structures (2023.02)
- Author : Hyun-Jin Cha
- Publication : Journal of Korean Politics
- Publisher : The Institute for Political Studies
- Volume : 32(1)
- Date : February 2023
Abstract: This paper aims to identify the changes of candlelight protest participants since 2004. While existing literature on candlelight protests tends to analyze the causes of candlelight protests at macro-level or the characteristics of candlelight protestors at micro-level, this paper analyzes the differences between a candlelight protest participant and a nonparticipant at micro-level while simultaneously considering the political opportunity structure. This research asserts that the police responses to protests and the Democratic advantage in Congress are the political opportunity structures that affect people to participate in the candlelight protests. The police responses to protests affect the cost to participate in the candlelight protest while the Democratic advantage in Congress impacts on the benefit from protesting. The impact of the political opportunity structure on the protest participation vary depending on the voter type. The empirical analysis shows the likelihood of core liberal voters and swing voters protesting decreased as police arrested protestors or suppressed protests. Also, the hypothesis was confirmed in that the increase of Democratic Advantage in Congress affected the likelihood of core liberal voters to protest more than it would affect the likelihood of swing voters to protest. As this paper evaluates a series of multiple candlelight protests and proposes a multilevel framework, the paper overcomes the limits of existing literature that studied candlelight protests from a single level.