Abstract
Collective actions such as protest movements have played a pivotal role in economic, political, and societal development worldwide. Because collective action can only be successful if a sufficient number of people join, decisions to participate are fundamentally strategic: they depend on beliefs about what others will do. At the same time, collective action typically requires the public expression of views, which makes a second mechanism crucial yet underexplored: social image, the reputational consequences of participating or not. Despite the theoretical importance of this channel, social image remains an underexplored determinant of collective action, as well as how protest movements gain momentum, sustain, or collapse over time. This project asks the following research questions: How do social image concerns — anticipated reputational consequences of participating or abstaining — shape individuals’ decisions to join collective action? Who are the “early movers” and the “second movers”?
We study these questions in the context of university students in Kenya. In June–July 2024 and 2025 Kenya experienced large-scale youth-led protests against a Finance Bill, referred to as the “Gen Z protests.” University students constituted a substantial share of participants. The setting is informative on three counts. First, like many recent protest movements, the Gen Z movement spread rapidly through social media, making peer beliefs and peer evaluations of participants highly salient. Second, the movement combined visible street protests with online activity, giving us two participation margins that differ sharply in their material costs. Third, further protest activity is plausible during the 2026 study window, providing a unique opportunity to understand the emergence of protest movements and to identify early versus second movers.
We conduct a baseline survey of ∼3,000 university students in Nairobi (June 2026), followed — conditional on protest activity occurring during the study window — by a 2 × 2 information-provision experiment that independently varies (i) information about peers’ intended participation, a replication of Cantoni et al. (2019) in a new setting, and (ii) information about how peers evaluate protest participants, the understudied social image dimension. Follow-up surveys track the joint dynamics of beliefs and participation.