"Everyday I'm Çapuling": Identity and Collective Action Through Social Network Sites in the Gezi Park Protests in Turkey

This contribution examines the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Turkey by drawing on the social identity model of collective action (SIMCA) and the slacktivism versus facilitation debate in the literature on digitally enabled collective action. Contrary to the slacktivism hypothesis that claims online collective action to lack an apparent impact on the real world, the current study indicates a facilitating role of online collective action in the Gezi Park protests. By means of a large-scale online survey (N = 1,127) and a subsequent latent path analysis, the study demonstrates that the endurance of the movement was kept alive by both offline and online collective actions. The relationship between offline/online action and protest motivations was mediated by three predictors of collective action derived from the SIMCA: perceived injustice, social identity, and perceived efficacy. Results show that protestors in Turkey, independent of whether they became active in the digital or the real world, were likely to protest again to the extent that they perceived developments in Turkey as unjust, identified strongly with the Çapulcus [Turkish for looters] as a social group, and perceived this group to be efficient in changing social injustice in the country.