The Spark and the Glue: Collective Action Motivation, Civic Duty, and Electoral Participation Among an Ethnic Minority and a National Majority

The social identity model of collective action explains why people protest. Do the same motivations influence voting? Most research has asked which option citizens support rather than whether they participate at all. We propose that collective motivation strengthens the belief that voting is an obligation, and that this sense of civic duty translates into voting. Two surveys test this prediction within one political system. Study 1 is a telephone survey of Arab citizens of Israel (N = 235). Study 2 is an online panel of Jewish citizens (N = 603). In both samples, collective motivation predicts intended participation on its own and is substantially attenuated once civic duty enters the model, while the indirect path through duty remains significant. Standardized coefficients converge across the two studies at each step of the model hierarchy, despite differences in survey mode, population, referent group, item count, and response metric. Protest is organized differently: motivation predicts it directly, voting habit is unrelated to it, and it does not mediate the electoral path. In both samples the association between collective motivation and participation is weaker among habitual voters than among citizens without an established voting routine, and in Study 2 the path from motivation to duty weakens as habit consolidates; in Study 1 it does not. We present the distinction between entry into participation and persistence in it as a proposal the data support in direction rather than a finding they establish. Collective motivation is the spark that brings citizens into electoral participation; civic duty, with habit, is the glue that holds them there.