Resources and Protest Mobilization – Substitution and Mediation in Collective Action

This article examines the role of three key resource dimensions – societal organizations, online networks, and financial endowments – in shaping protest mobilization across US counties. Each resource dimension is operationalized using principal component analysis and incorporated into a Poisson quasimaximum likelihood estimation. The results show that all three dimensions significantly increase the expected number of protest events. Notably, societal organizations and online networks show a substitutive relationship in mobilization processes. Moreover, the analysis reveals that resources, particularly societal organizations, mediate the effect of grievances on protest activity. These findings contribute to the literature on Resource Mobilization Theory by disentangling different resource dimensions and assessing their mediating role for grievances.