The Social Costs of Public Political Participation: Evidence from a Petition Experiment in Lebanon

Abstract

While it is widely appreciated that public political action can be socially costly, there is little evidence of the effects of social pressure on petition signing despite its importance as a mode of political participation. We examine the social costs of petition signing in the context of mass mobilization to reform the sectarian political system in Lebanon. We invited a representative sample of 2,496 adults to sign a petition calling for an end to sectarian politics, randomly assigning respondents to a public condition where they had to provide their names or a private condition where they did not. Our results show that public signing reduced willingness to participate by 20 percentage points despite substantial private support for reform and that this reduction was significantly greater for those more afraid of social sanctioning. This is strong evidence that social pressure can deter individuals from publicly expressing their private political preferences.