To explain political activism, much of the literature focuses on particular macro-level factors, such as poverty, territory, or social networks. This focus does not provide information about the complex micro-level mechanisms by which different types of factors motivate political activism. In response, this paper draws on the political psychology literature and focuses on the reasoning processes of political activists. Reasoning processes provide highly structured representations of the interconnections by which multiple factors motivate people to engage in political behavior. These representations consist of chains of interconnected beliefs about external and internal factors that are antecedent to decisions to engage in certain actions; they identify configurations of factors underlying political behavior.
I study reasoning processes underlying violent and nonviolent activism in the Middle East and Europe. To gather information, I conducted hundreds of interviews with violent and nonviolent activists (in Arabic, French and German). To identify reasoning processes from these interviews, I applied qualitative methods developed by Corbin and Strauss, coding the actors’ direct speech for: 1. Beliefs (about various types of factors), 2. Connections between these beliefs (inferences), and 3. Decisions for actions (participation in violent or nonviolent activism).
The data consist of a large number of combinations of beliefs antecedent to decisions for actions. To analyze these data, I develop a simple computational model (in Python) that formalizes reasoning processes as Boolean circuits. Drawing on Boolean algebra, the model identifies 1. Combinations of beliefs based on which all individuals make decisions for actions, 2. Shared chains of interconnected beliefs that can trigger decisions for actions, 3. Counterfactuals in which no individuals would have decided to engage in political activism. The findings provide new insight about belief configurations and reasoning processes underlying violent and nonviolent activism.
