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Ever since the publication ofVoting(Berelson et al. 1954), individual-level electoral studies have underscored the predictive utility of attitudes on voting behavior. More recently, developments in social psychology have led political scientists to examine closely the process by which attitudes guide behavior (Fazio 1986; Aldrich et al. 1989). Findings in this research generally suggest that attitudes must be available and accessible if they are to exert any influence on perceptions, judgments, or behavior.

In recent decades, there has been a revival of contentious social movements worldwide. Given the collective action problem, what factors motivate ordinary citizens to join protests? If the issue of a protest matters, what factors motivate people to weigh different issues differently? This paper devises a unified theory of collective action and argues that individuals are more likely to join a protest when they perceive higher values of the public good, higher expressive benefits, higher expected turnouts, and lower costs of participation. It contends that the effects of those factors are moderated by individuals' post-materialist values and confidence in future personal freedom. Employing an online conjoint survey experiment to analyze protest participation among citizens in Hong Kong, this paper finds that protesters are more driven by liberal-democratic issues than socioeconomic issues. The findings highlight the mechanisms through which political beliefs increase protest participation. Political beliefs change the effects of public goods associated with certain issues, and to some extent alter the cost-benefit calculations of potential protesters.

In recent decades, Hong Kong witnessed a number of protest movements that drew high levels of participation, most of which revolved around political issues. Why did ordinary citizens protest? What were the underlying factors that motivated Hongkongers to protest? We argue that post-materialism and grievances toward the government increase the selective expressive benefits for individuals to participate in protests. We illustrate that the two factors contribute to the protest movements in Hong Kong in general. Using the World Values Survey data, we found that post-materialism interacted with grievances toward the political system to increase Hongkongers' propensity to protest. Our findings have important implications for the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Movement in Hong Kong.

Recent interest in voters' anti-incumbent sentiments focuses on generational change as well as public weariness with partisan control of a long duration. Theories on the electoral effects of such behaviors predict partisan cycles that suggest rising hazards of party incumbency. This article provides an analytical framework for examining changes and durations of party control in presidential elections as a discrete point process. We introduce the discrete Weibull distribution for testing contagion in the context of renewal theory and develop the notion of pseudo-periodicity for a binary process. Our findings based on this event history approach confirm the claim that party incumbency engenders rising hazards. The partisan cycles that we identified have a pseudo-period of approximately six to eight presidential terms.