Collective Protest and Legitimacy of Authority

A theory of collective protest is proposed in which distrust and the erosion of the legitimacy of authority are postulated to be a function of frustrations perceived as inequitably imposed and arbitrary. The present study tested the predictions that protest groups would have a significantly lower evaluation of authority, be more willing to participate in violence, and have a greater sense of competence than nonprotest groups. Two separate studies were conducted. The first study compared attitudes of an activist protest group, the Young Socialist Alliance, with two nonprotest groups, an active voter registration group and a nonactive student group at the University of Texas. The second study dealt with the attitudes of the campus activist Mexican-American Youth Organization (MAYO) and a Mexican-American non-MAYO group. The following instruments were administered individually and anonymously: a semantic differential to evaluate traditional and legitimate author ities; a participation questionnaire requesting willingness to participate in negotiation, protest, and violent confrontation with authority; a credibility-rating scale to measure the trustworthiness of information issued by authority, and a modified internal-external scale to provide an indirect assessment of competence. The results supported the hypotheses derived from the theory of collective protest.