Threat Crowds Out Solidarity: How Politicization Erodes Discursive Support for Protest

Classical theories of protest reception, best articulated in Turner (1969), posit that public support emerges from competition among simultaneously active framing mechanisms whose dominance shifts as a conflict matures. Such claims have been hard to test: surveys are too sparse, static content analysis obscures dynamics, and experimental vignettes isolate single frames from the competition that defines the theory. However, high-resolution digital discourse makes fine-grained temporal testing tractable. Using 340,729 Polish-language tweets from the 2019 teachers’ strike, we operationalize Turner’s five mechanisms as daily keyword-share indicators assessed for semantic coherence using Confirmatory Factor Analysis on Word Embeddings, and track sentiment with distributed lag and counterfactual state-space models across six phase transitions. Three patterns emerge after accounting for multiple testing: threat framing surged at onset and crowded out conciliation and bargaining; resumed negotiations depressed sentiment as bargaining collapsed while conciliation doubled — a capitulation signal; and political-coalition references were strongly associated with eroded sentiment (β₀ = −0.042) while civic-solidarity references were not.