Does Loyalty Mediate the Link Between Digital and Non-digital Protest Participation and Migration Intentions Among Hongkongers?

Previous studies have inadequately addressed Hirschman’s exit, voice, and loyalty framework in understanding emigration, especially within the Hong Kong context. We contribute to this literature by adopting a comprehensive theoretical framework that accounts for the effect of both online and physical forms of protest (voice) and loyalty to the state on Hongkongers’ intentions to emigrate (exit) following the 2019 anti-extradition bill protests. We draw on the nationally representative Hong Kong data from the Asian Barometer Wave 5 (October 2019- January 2021). We operationalized exit as those who aspire to emigrate elsewhere, digital voice as those who use online mediums to sign a petition or criticize the government and its policies, non-digital voice as those who participate in physical protests against the government, and loyalty as individuals who believe that citizens must remain loyal to the Hong Kong government regardless of its imperfections. Results from the final model of our hierarchical logit regression analysis demonstrate that loyalty has a statistically significant negative effect on exit (B=-0.731, p>0.05) and mediated the positive effect of non-digital voice (B=0.128, p=0.448) and digital voice (B=0.355, p>0.05) on exit by 48.59% and 24.62%, respectively. Thus, loyalty reduces the positive effect of protest action on emigration, but for Hongkongers who participate in online protests loyalty does not significantly discount their intentions to emigrate. Our study makes two important theoretical contributions. First, we integrate the key concepts of exit, voice, and loyalty in Hirschman’s framework. Second, we dissect digital and non-digital voice and their salience on exit.