This study demonstrates whether and how climate protest increases or decreases the “sentiment pools” available to the climate movement. Using an experimental vignette survey design (n = 1,421), the author finds that compared with a control condition, peaceful marches are effective for both independents and Democrats, while civil disobedience has a positive effect among Democrats. These effects are isolated to those who are most certain of anthropogenic climate change. No effect is observed among
Experimental vignette
The Activist’s Dilemma: Extreme Protest Actions Reduce Popular Support for Social Movements
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes
How do protest actions impact public support for social movements? Here we test the claim that extreme
protest actions—protest behaviors perceived to be harmful to others, highly disruptive, or both—
typically reduce support for social movements. Across 6 experiments, including 3 that were preregistered,
participants indicated less support for social movements that used more extreme protest actions. This
result obtained across a variety of movements (e.g., animal rights, anti-Trump, anti-abortio
Experimental vignette
Demonstrating Power: How Protest Persuades Political Representatives
How do public opinion signals affect political representatives’ opinion formation? To date, we have only limited knowledge about this essential representative process. In this article, we theorize and examine the signaling strength of one type of societal signal: protest. We do so by means of an innovative experiment conducted among Belgian national and regional politicians. Elected officials were exposed to manipulated television news items covering a protest demonstration. Following Tilly’s pr
Experimental vignette
The Impact of Public Opinion on Public Policy: A Review and an Agenda
This article considers the impact of public opinion on public policy, asking: (1) how much impact it has; (2) how much the impact increases as the salience of issues increases; (3) to what extent the impact of public opinion may be negated by interest groups, social movement organizations, political parties, and elites; (4) whether responsiveness of governments to public opinion has changed over time; and (5) the extent to which our conclusions can be generalized. The source of data is publicati
Meta-analysis
Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting
ow do stigmatized minorities advance agendas when confronted with hostile majorities? Elite theories of influence posit marginal groups exert little power. I propose the concept of agenda
seeding to describe how activists use methods like disruption to capture the attention of media and
overcome political asymmetries. Further, I hypothesize protest tactics influence how news organizations
frame demands. Evaluating black-led protests between 1960 and 1972, I find nonviolent activism, particularly
Natural experiment using rainfall as exogenous variable + other stuff
The recent rise of groups
focused on climate change such as Extinction Rebellion and School Strike for Climate have
been presaged by over two decades of transnational climate activism engaging a diverse
range of actors across the global north and south, and involving a vibrant mix of strategies
and tactics. But to what extent do these activists incorporate civil resistance—that is, nonviolent, extra-institutional, conflict-waging tactics—into their tactical repertoire? Further, to the
extent tha
Analysis of outcomes +
Case studies
Social tipping processes towards climate action: A conceptual framework
Drawing from expert insights and comprehensive literature review, we develop a framework to identify and characterize social tipping processes critical to facilitating rapid social transformations. We find that social tipping processes are distinguishable from those of already more widely studied climate and ecological tipping dynamics. In particular, we identify human agency, social-institutional network structures, different spatial and temporal scales and increased complexity as key distincti
Literature review, expert insights, analysis of voting and public opinion data
See old but open access paper here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.04488.pdf
How exposure to media about the 2019 London April Rebellion affected the UK general public
BBC news and direct Rebel messaging caused increases in the public’s belief in the necessity of civil disobedience. Further, direct Rebel messaging increased claimed intentions to participate in civil disobedience, and decreased satisfaction
with Government action, although neither of these were influenced by the BBC report. The Daily Mail article had no detectable effects on these opinions and intentions. The effects of direct Rebel messaging apparently applied equally across the left-right pol
Experimental vignette
Public opinion of the 2019 London April Rebellion: Before, during and after
Support for Extinction Rebellion’s methods of civil disobedience increased after the April Rebellion compared to hypothetical support prior to the events. Extrapolating from our weighted poll, roughly 2.2 million additional people (4% more of the adult GB population) strongly supported XR's civil
disobedience after the April Rebellion. However, this did not translate to a similar increase in intentions to engage in civil disobedience. Overall, such intentions decreased, although no decrease was
Survey before, during and after protests
Do Political Protests Matter? Evidence from the Tea Party Movement
This chapter discusses the use of multiple data sources and collection methods, or triangulation, in research design. It addresses both the benefits and concerns related to mixed-methods approaches (focusing on the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods), followed by illustrative examples of how to select and effectively apply the appropriate methods with which to address a given research problem. Drawing on examples from work on transnational LGBT rights activism in Europe and immi
The War at Home: Antiwar Protests and Congressional Voting, 1965 to 1973
High
Doug McAdam and Yang Su
2002
United States
Antiwar
Protest impact on voting
Public opinion impact on policy
Protest impact on public opinion
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3088914?casa_token=yUciEmf53gYAAAAA:vyK7UlCL3kn1GzPGNY78UnsbHiy58SXNkiC-QQSnBceYislIlxuXjm3yR0Rtig8M5ys5Ur0-i-Yh2lRgO8P2ND-QzgeKj4H961Ei5SK3tEdGk6Y7bg f
American Sociological Review
Time-series analysis is used to assess the relationship between antiwar protests and congressional voting on war-related roll calls during the Vietnam era. Using protest event data coded from The New York Times and counts of roll-call votes generated from congressional voting data, we test for three specific mechanisms: disruptive protest, signaling, and public opinion shift. Extreme forms of disruptive protest are hypothesized as having a direct positive effect on congressional voting. Lohmann'
Analysis of voting, public opinion and congressional (legislative) data
The Impact of Protest on Elections in the United States
Objectives
The objective of this study was to understand the effect of citizen mobilization on both electoral outcomes and on the likelihood that new candidates will enter races to challenge incumbent politicians.
Methods
This study uses quantitative, longitudinal data (at the congressional-district level) on protest, electoral outcomes, and challengers entering races, which are analyzed using an autoregressive distributed lagged regression model.
Results
Results show that protests that expres
Longitudinal data on protest and electoral outcomes analyzed using an autoregressive distributed lagged regression model.
Think there are some problems with this study - concerns about the causal inference strategy and the p-values used for significance (p < 0.10).
Weather to Protest: The Effect of Black Lives Matter Protests on the 2020 Presidential Election
Do mass mobilizations bring about social change? This paper investigates the impact of the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted after George Floyd’s death on the 2020 presidential election. Using local precipitation as an exogenous source of protest variation, we document a marked shift in support for the Democratic candidate in counties that experienced more protesting activity. We use a spatial two-stage least squares estimator, and show that conventional TSLS estimators overestimate the e
Instrumental Variables using rainfall
Very new study - not been published yet but is by reputable academics, good causal inference design, and very relevant.
Much of the protest literature has examined the policy consequences of social protests. Few studies focus on the effect of social protests on public opinion. We examine the impact of the 2006 immigration protests on the saliency of immigration among Latinos. The 2006 Latino National Survey was in the field before and after the protests began, creating a natural experiment. Using these data, we discover protests increased Latinos’ perception of undocumented immigration as the most important probl
Protests are a frequently used intervention in animal advocacy. We estimate that between 40 and 80 animal advocacy protests occur each week in the U.S. alone. Despite their prevalence, the purpose and effects of protests are poorly understood. One common misconception is that protests are intended to change public opinion; in fact, organizers often report that protests are intended to disrupt existing states of affairs in order to spur more systemic change.
In discussions of effective animal advocacy (EAA) — the field of study for how we can most effectively help animals, also known as effective altruism for animals — there are several important, challenging, and sometimes controversial foundational[1] questions that come up over and over. This post attempts to summarize and catalog the key evidence[2] cited by EAA supporters on each side of these debates for easy reference. For example, in the “Effective Animal Advocacy - Discussion” Facebook grou
Literature Review
The Persistent Effect of U.S. Civil Rights Protests on Political Attitudes
Protests can engender significant institutional change. Can protests also continue to shape a nation's contemporary politics outside of more formalized channels? I argue that social movements can not only beget institutional change, but also long-run, attitudinal change. Using the case of the U.S. civil rights movement, I develop a theory in which protests can shift attitudes and these attitudes can persist. Data from over 150,000 survey respondents provide evidence consistent with the theory. W
Social Protest and Policy Attitudes: The Case of the 2006 Immigrant Rallies
High
Regina Branton et al
2015
United States
Immigration
Protest impact on public opinion
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24363573
American Journal of Political Science
Do protests sway public opinion? If so, why and how? To address these questions, we examine the impact of the 2006 immigration protests on immigration policy preferences. We use the 2006 Latino National Survey coupled with protest data to examine whether temporal and spatial exposure to the protests are associated with policy preferences. Our findings lend evidence that protest activity influences Latinos' immigration policy preferences. However, the findings suggest the effect of protest on imm
This Element reviews the social psychology of effective collective action, highlighting the importance of considering activists' goals, timeframes, and psychological perspectives in seeking to conceptualise this construct. A novel framework 'ABIASCA' maps effectiveness in relation to activists' goals for mobilisation and change (Awareness raising; Building sympathy; turning sympathy into Intentions; turning intentions into Actions; Sustaining groups over time; Coalition-building; and Avoiding op
Literature review
Black Lives Matter for Whites’ Racial Prejudice: Assessing the Role of Social Movements in Shaping Racial Attitudes in the United States
High
Soumyajit Mazumder
2019
United States
Black lives matter
Civil rights
Protest impact on public opinion
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/ap46d/
Not yet published
Black Lives Matter (BLM) is one of the most prominent contemporary social movements inthe United States. Whether the BLM movement has led to racial attitude liberalization remains anopen question. I evaluate this question using data on over 140,000 survey respondents combinedwith locational data on BLM protests in 2014 following the police killing of Michael Brown and EricGarner. Results from a difference-in-differences identification strategy provide evidence indicatingthat the BLM movement was
Difference in differences
Amplifying Public Opinion: The Policy Impact of the U.S. Environmental Movement
High
Jon Agnone
2007
United States
Climate
https://sci-hub.yncjkj.com/10.2307/4495000
loyalties. To demonstrate this dynamic, we employ longitudinal data to show that increases in
The public, the protester, and the bill: do legislative agendas respond to public opinion signals?
Legislators adapt their policies and agendas to public priorities. Yet research on dynamic representation usually focuses on the influence of public opinion through surveys leaving out other public opinion signals. We incorporate mobilization of the public through protest. Combining insights from social movement studies and political science, we expect protest not to have a direct effect on attention change in legislative agendas. If anything protest should have an amplification effect on public
Time-series analysis
Useless Protest? A Time-Series Analysis of the Policy Outcomes of Ecology, Antinuclear, and Peace Movements in the United States, 1977-1995
This project explores whether and how corporations become more receptive to social activist challenges over time. Drawing from social movement theory, we suggest a dynamic process through which contentious interactions lead to increased receptivity. We argue that when firms are chronically targeted by social activists, they respond defensively by adopting strategic management devices that help them better manage social issues and demonstrate their normative appropriateness. These defensive devic
Longitudinal analysis
Movement Organizations, Synergistic Tactics and Environmental Public Policy
Social movement scholars have considered several political and cultural consequences of social movements, but have paid limited attention to whether and how social movements shape discourse. We develop a theory of discursive eruption, referring to the ability of radical movements to initially ignite media coverage but not control the content once other actors— particularly those that can take advantage of journalistic norms—enter the discourse. We hold that one long-term outcome of radical socia
Analysing salience and coverage of media
When Do Movements Matter? The Politics of Contingency and the Equal Rights Amendment
High
Soule and Olzak
2004
voting among southern voters, but only in counties where the Klan had been active
The Complex Agenda-Setting Power of Protest: Demonstrations, Media, Parliament, Government, and Legislation in Belgium, 1993-2000
How do protest actions succeed in winning public support? In this paper, I theorize how features of protest can persuade citizens to support demonstrators. In particular, I argue that broadcasting an attractive collective identity by means of diverse, worthy, united, numerous and committed participants (dWUNC) triggers supportive reactions of observers through increasing identification with protesters. I test this argument by exposing respondents to manipulated television news items of a protest
Experimental vignette
Protesters at the news gates: An experimental study of journalists' news judgment of protest events
Media attention is a key political resource for protesters. This implies that journalists are a crucial audience protesters seek to appeal to. We study to what extent features of protest, of journalists and of news organizations, affect journalists' news judgment. We exposed 78 Spanish journalists to vignettes of asylum seeker protests. Four features were systematically manipulated: protesters' worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment (WUNC). The experiments scrutinize the extent to which journ
What makes protest powerful? Prevailing theoretical and empirical accounts of protest impact stress the importance of a favorable context—an advantageous opportunity structure—to explain social movement success. This study presents an alternative and complementary theoretical perspective, stressing the agency of social movements in producing wanted outcomes. We argue that protest matters in part because of the features it displays, altering the calculations of o
Theoretical framework
The Legitimacy of Protest: Explaining White Southerners' Attitudes Toward the Civil Rights Movement
Activists seek attention for their causes and want to win sympathy from the broader public. Why do some citizens but not others approve when activists use protest tactics? This is a crucial but poorly understood aspect of social movements. While most prior research has focused on the personal determinants of attitudes toward movements, we argue that proximity to protest may cultivate positive views about a movement. Individuals living near centers of movement activity may become more favorable t
Survey from 1961 with other data
Loud and clear: The effect of protest signals on congressional attention
We examine the effect of public protest on policy by considering how protests may matter to lawmakers. Research on this topic suggests that protest signals information to lawmakers about citizen preferences. Empirical work finds that the strength of the signal sent by protest can influence its effectiveness in achieving desired policy goals. We build on this insight by arguing that signal clarity is also important. Public protests sending focused and clear messages to lawmakers are more likely t
The Impact of Political Parties, Interest Groups, and Social Movement Organizations on Public Policy: Some Recent Evidence and Theoretical Concerns
This article considers the direct impact of political parties, interest groups, and social movement organizations (SMOs) on policy, providing evidence for a “core” hypothesis and three others that refine or qualify it. The core hypothesis: all three types of organizations have substantial impacts on policy. The other three: (1) when public opinion is taken into account, the political organizations do not have such an impact; (2) parties have a greater impact than interest groups and SMOs; and (3
Finds limited impact of SMOs
Political Protest and Policy Change: The Direct Impacts of Indian Anti-Privatization Mobilizations, 1990-2003
counties where the Ku Klux Klan had been active in the 1960s. In an individual-level analysis
Finds that greater disruption correlates with more favourable policy outcomes
Political Polarization as a social movement outcome: 1960s Klan Activism and its enduring impact on political realignment in Southern Counties, 1960 to 2000
Radical social movements can exacerbate tensions in local settings while drawing attention
to how movement goals align with political party agendas. Short-term movement influence
on voting outcomes can endure when orientations toward the movement disrupt social
ties, embedding individuals within new discussion networks that reinforce new partisan
loyalties. To demonstrate this dynamic, we employ longitudinal data to show that increases in
Republican voting, across several different time interval
Longitudinal data analysis
Black Lives Matter protests shift public discourse
High
Dunivin et al.
2022
United States
Black lives matter
Protest impact on discourse
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2117320119
PNAS?
We show that Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests shift public discourse toward the movement’s agenda, as captured by social media and news reports. We find that BLM protests dramatically amplify the use of terms associated with the BLM agenda throughout the movement’s history. Longitudinal data show that terms denoting the movement’s theoretically distinctive ideas, such as “systemic racism,” receive more attention during waves of protest. We show that these shocks have notable impact beyond inten
Implicit in recent scholarly debates about the efªcacy of methods of warfare is the assumption that
the most effective means of waging political struggle entails violence.1 Among
political scientists, the prevailing view is that opposition movements select violent methods because such means are more effective than nonviolent strategies at achieving policy goals.2 Despite these assumptions, from 2000 to 2006
organized civilian populations successfully employed nonviolent methods including
boycot
Book (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691164694/when-movements-anchor-parties)
Throughout American history, some social movements, such as organized labor and the Christian Right, have forged influential alliances with political parties, while others, such as the antiwar movement, have not. When Movements Anchor Parties provides a bold new interpretation of American electoral history by examining five prominent movements and their relationships with political parties.
In the context of all the social movements we’ve considered, modern American environmentalism shares two unusual characteristics with the animal advocacy movement: a need for allies to speak on behalf of those who lack political power of their own (ecosystems, farmed animals) and a strong focus on consumer change (recycling, veganism). These common features make environmentalism a particularly promising case study for understanding the most effective ways to help animals.
World Protests: A Study of Key Protest Issues in the 21st Century
This book presents the results of a protest event analysis undertaken in 2013 and 2020 by a team of four researchers. The study
analyzes data on 2809 protests, which made up more than 900 protest
movements. These took place in 101 countries, and a great number of
protests also crossed international boundaries. The research compiles data
from 15 years of news reports available online, mainly in six languages
(Arabic, English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish, although
some research was con
AS WITH WEAPONS OF VIOLENCE, the weapons of civil resistance are numerous, diverse, and ever-evolving. In addition to strikes, boycotts, mass demonstrations and other widespread actions, new tactics are regularly being invented as civil resisters adapt to opportunities, challenges, and tactics by their opponents.
The expanding repertoire of nonviolent tactics (sometimes referred to as methods by researchers like Gene Sharp) is a testament to the ingenuity and creativity of activists around the
Mass mobilisation project
Medium
David Clark
2020
Global
Dataset of protests
https://massmobilization.github.io/about.html
Harvard Dataverse
The Mass Mobilization (MM) data are an effort to understand citizen movements against governments, what citizens want when they demonstrate against governments, and how governments respond to citizens. The MM data cover 162 countries between 1990 and 2018.
These data contain events where 50 or more protesters publicly demonstrate against government, resulting in more than 10,000 protest events. Each event records location, protest size, protester demands, and government responses.
For each eve
ACLED Protest data set
Medium
ACLED
2022
Global
Dataset of protests
https://acleddata.com/curated-data-files/
ACLED Data
The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) is a disaggregated data collection, analysis, and crisis mapping project. ACLED collects the dates, actors, locations, fatalities, and types of all reported political violence and protest events across Africa, the Middle East, Latin America & the Caribbean, East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia & the Caucasus, Europe, and the United States of America. The ACLED team conducts analysis to describe, explore, and test conflict sc
What Makes A Successful Campaign?
Medium
Edward Bottomley, Carly Munnelly, Luke Tryl and Seb W
This review explores the current literature on campaigning in order to answer two questions which are central to running any effective campaign: How to craft a message and how to deliver a message
Literature Review
Nested Analysis as a Mixed-Method Strategy for Comparative Research
Despite repeated calls for the use of “mixed methods” in comparative analysis, political scientists have few systematic guides for carrying out such work. This paper details a unified approach which joins intensive case-study analysis with statistical analysis. Not only are the advantages of each approach combined, but also there is a synergistic value to the nested research design: for example, statistical analyses can guide case selection for in-depth research, provide direction for more focus
This blog post series explores methodological questions and challenges in the use of historical research by Sentience Institute, the effective altruism community, and the farmed animal movement. It is broader in scope, more theoretical, and more meta than most of Sentience Institute’s research, but I have tried to regularly bring the discussion back to concrete examples (e.g. WWI and the French Revolution) with concrete implications for advocates. The other posts are on “What can the farmed anim
Case studies, literature review
From Protest to Agenda Building: Description Bias in Media Coverage of Protest Events in Washington, D.C.
Medium
Smith et al.
2001
United States
Protest impact on discourse
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2675477
Social Forces
Protest as a Political Resource
Medium
Michael Lipsky
1968
United States
Protest impacts broad
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1953909
American Political Science Review
This paper is cited by loads of the other papers, one of the first papers conceptualising protest as having an influence on politics through a political science lens.
The Media as a Dual Mediator of the Political Agenda–Setting Effect of Protest. A Longitudinal Study in Six Western European Countries
Medium
Vliegenthart et al
2016
Western Europe
Protest impact on discourse
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26166852
Social Forces
World Protests.org
Medium
Dataset of protests
https://worldprotests.org/#/about
The Polarizing Effect of the March for Science on Attitudes toward Scientists
Americans’ attitudes toward scientists have become more negative in recent years. Although researchers have considered several individual-level factors that might explain this change, little attention has been given to the political actions of scientists themselves. This article considers how March for Science rallies that took place across the United States in late April 2017 influenced Americans’ attitudes toward scientists and the research they produce. An online panel study surveying respond
Differences-in-Differences Design
Practices, Opportunity, and Protest Effectiveness: Illustrations from Four Animal Rights Campaigns
Medium
Rachel L. Einwohner
1999
Making protests effective
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3097251
Social Problems
Youth for Climate Belgium: The narrative of an exceptional protest wave
All across the globe, youngsters are staging protest, demanding politicians to take the climate crisis seriously. What started with a lonely, striking Swedish schoolgirl giving an inspiring speech at the COP24 Climate Conference in Poland, quickly became an international movement and culminated in a global day of action on March 15th. On that single day, no less than 1.6 million people in more than 125 countries at 2000 different locations walked the streets and demanded better climate policies.
Case study + trend / media analysis
What the WUNC? Perceptions of WUNC and Social Movement Mobilization
Charles Tilly (1994) provided a four-part framework that outsiders (e.g., targets, potential supporters) use when assessing a social movement: worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment (WUNC). These attributes have been embraced, sometimes implicitly, by most scholars of movement recruitment and mobilization. However, this measure has never been explicitly tested as an evaluative schema used by outsiders in making mobilization decisions. Here, we first develop a measure designed to assess the f
Social Movements as Extra-Institutional Entrepreneurs: The Effect of Protests on Stock Price Returns
This paper uses social movement theory to examine one way in which secondary stakeholders outside the corporation may influence organizational processes, even if they are excluded from participating in legitimate channels of organizational change. Using data on activist protests of U.S. corporations during 1962–1990, we examine the effect of protests on abnormal stock price returns, an indicator of investors' reactions to a focal event. Empirical analysis demonstrates that protests are more infl
Do campaigns encouraging constituents to contact their legislator influence public policy? We answer this question with a field experiment in which Michigan state legislators are randomly assigned to be contacted by their constituents about a specific bill or to a control group. The field experimental design allows us to produce internally and externally valid estimates of the effects on legislative voting of a campaign in which constituents are urged to contact their legislator. The estimated e
Does Grassroots Lobbying Work?: A Field Experiment Measuring the Effects of an e-Mail Lobbying Campaign on Legislative Behavior
There are few reliable estimates of the effect of grassroots lobbying on legislative behavior. The analysis in this article circumvents methodological problems that plague existing studies by randomly assigning legislators to be contacted by a grassroots e-mail lobbying campaign. The experiment was conducted in the context of a grassroots lobbying campaign through cooperation with a coalition of groups lobbying a state legislature. The results show that grassroots lobbying by e-mail has a substa
Experimental evidence for tipping points in social convention
Once a population has converged on a consensus, how can a group with a minority viewpoint overturn it? Theoretical models have emphasized tipping points, whereby a sufficiently large minority can change the societal norm. Centola et al. devised a system to study this in controlled experiments. Groups of people who had achieved a consensus about the name of a person shown in a picture were individually exposed to a confederate who promoted a different name. The only incentive was to coordinate. W
Between Disruption and Coordination: Building Insider-Outsider Strategies
In recent months we have seen clashing imaginaries (the set of values, narratives, and symbols through which people make sense of the social spaces they occupy) at play in the wave of protests for Black lives after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, as part of the ongoing struggle to challenge historic systems of oppression. Turning these clashes into productive action toward justice requires what social movement analysts call “insider-outsider” strategies. These uneasy coalitions combi
The Engagement: America's Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage
Low
Sasha Issenberg
2021
United States
Social movements broadly
https://www.sashaissenberg.com/
Book
On June 26, 2015, the United States Supreme Court ruled that state bans on gay marriage were unconstitutional, making same-sex unions legal throughout the United States. But the road to victory was much longer than many know. In this seminal work, Sasha Issenberg takes us back to Hawaii in the 1990s, when that state's courts first started grappling with the question, through the emergence of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 that raised marriage to a national issue, to the first legal same-sex