Data were analysed using frequencies, percentages, chi-square test and fisher’s exact test. Assisted self-administered questionnaire was adapted and modified from two studies that was done in Scotland and Malaysia. A cross-sectional study was done in April 2016 among 101 Form 4 (secondary school) students using universal sampling procedure. This study measured the prevalence of future intention to smoke e-cigarette and explored the possible determinants, particularly the peer motivations. Based on the study results authors conclude that institutions of representative democracy, political elites and policy makers should view protest behaviour as a democratic potential, since it is not only becoming increasingly popular and relevant form of expression of citizens’ voice in Europe, but because mainly the prodemocratic oriented public is most likely to protest.Īlthough research in high-income countries highlighted that peer influence served as an important factor in the first-time use of e-cigarette among the secondary school students, there is a lack of research on this topic in Malaysia. Finally, the participation–prodemocratic attitudes link was stronger in established democracies. Among the latter, male gender, higher education, higher income and larger size of the residential settlement all had a significant positive effect, while higher age had a negative effect on protest participation. At the individual level prodemocratic attitudes had a positive effect on protest participation, even after controlling for other relevant characteristics. The results indicated that 1) higher levels of socioeconomic development were the only significant makro-predictor of protest participation, while countries’ GINI index of income inequality, continuous years as a democracy, postcommunist past and present levels of quality of democratic institutions (Freedom House scores) all proved non-significant.
We employed the representative natiional samples of 2008 of wave of European Values Study. We hypothesized that levels of socioeconomic development and communist past would prove to be the strongest macropredictors of levels of protest participation (Inglehart and Welzel, 2007), and that prodemocratic orientations positively affect protest participation, even when controlling for other individual and state characteristics. Using multilevel modelling allowed us to examine simultaneously the effect of individual-level as well as group-level predictors of protest participation (signing petitions, joining in boycotts, and attending lawful demonstrations).
We investigated associations between macro-level country characteristics and single-level sociodemographic and political cultural variables (prodemocratic attitudes index used by Klingemann et al., 2006).
In addition, the majority of studies employed single-level analyses, not taking into account country-level characteristics, or vice versa. Many researchers argue that protest participation is crucial for consolidation and functioning of democracies, and past studies have shown that at the individual leve protest participation is associated with prodemocratic attitudes, though past research has rarely compared motivations behind protest participation in established and postcommunist European democracies.
In recent decades protest participation has become one of the most widely accepted and practiced forms of citizen engagement in democratic countries.