In this talk, I will present our multi-national study with large representative samples examining how norms on the personal, group, and societal level relate to citizens' engagement in actions to promote systemic change.
Addressing today's environmental and social challenges requires more than individual lifestyle changes—it demands systemic transformation. Citizens play a crucial role in advancing such transformations, by urging broader societal actors such as governments, businesses, and fellow citizens to act. Such citizen actions, i.e. circular citizenship behaviours (CCBs), include protesting, attending public assemblies (aimed at governments), boycotting companies, speaking up in one's organisation (aimed at businesses), or motivating people around (aimed at other citizens). When choosing how to behave, people oftentimes look at how others behave (i.e. social norms) to guide their own choices. As citizens' actions are embedded in the societal system at large as well as their closer social circles, we hypothesize that group and societal descriptive norms play a crucial role in promoting CCBs and that this relation is mediated by personal norms.
We conducted an online survey in five European countries (Germany, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and the UK; N = 5,651) and used path analyses to investigate overall effects and possible country differences.
Our findings reveal that a substantial share of citizens never engage in CCBs, though participation is somewhat higher when actions target fellow citizens. Further, our results confirm our hypotheses. Together, social and personal norms explain a significant portion of variance in engagement (44% for actions directed at governments, 45% for businesses, and 49% for other citizens). Thus, our results underscore the pivotal role of social and personal norms for citizen action for systemic change. Consequently, increasing perceptions of other people's engagement to strengthen descriptive norms or targeting people's feelings of moral obligation might be an effective way of strengthening citizen engagement.