Firing the Monk when the Ceremony is Over: A Study on the Split Between Student Protesters and their Leaders after the 2014 Umbrella Movement

The Anti-Extradition Bill Movement of 2019 has caught the attention of international headlines by being a large-scale leaderless movement. This leaderless feature may have spawned from the aftermath of the 2014 Umbrella Movement, soon after which, university students voted to disaffiliate with its leadership, the Hong Kong Federation of Students. We conducted a study to examine the psychological factors that contributed to such disaffiliation, including perceived integrity-based trustworthiness and perceived competence-based trustworthiness. We tested their mediation effects on the relationship between group identification with the movement protesters and the corresponding voting decision in disaffiliation with the leader. This study recruited voters in a referendum at a university in Hong Kong to decide on its fate with the Federation of Students (N = 113). Results of ordinal logistic regression suggest that lower perceived integrity-based trustworthiness and perceived competence-based trustworthiness significantly predicted voting decision to disaffiliate with the leader. Mediation analysis with bootstrapping found a significant indirect effect of voters’ group identification with UM protesters on voting decision through perceived integrity, but not perceived competence.