There is a lot of text. Within the 62 page documents there are further links to literature reviews, interviews, etc.
Could someone who has read through all of this (or did the research) give me a few of the most convincing empirical tests/findings that support protests being effective? I kind of want to see more numbers.
I’m gonna copy a section from the “Select Findings” header as you might find some of it useful. I’ll link a few papers to back up each point but there is more in the lit review if you do want to look further.
Sustained interest in novel discourse put forward by Black Lives Matter a year after the majority of protests, and shown to be up to 10x larger than pre-protest activity (Dunivin, 2022; Wasow, 2020 found something similar from the Civil Rights period).
Belgian MPs who were exposed to news articles about protests were more likelyto say the issue was high salience, more likely to take a position closer to that of the protesters, and more likely to say they intended to take action on the issue (Wouters and Walgrave, 2017). Reading off their graph, it looks like this changed their position and likelihood of taking action by 0.4 on a 10 point Likert scale (so around 4% increase).
Our bespoke public opinion polling found that disruptive nonviolent climate protest in the UK did not cause any “backfire” effect i.e. there was no negative impact on public support for climate despite disruptive tactics. There’s also weak evidence that it raised the number of people willing to take part in climate activism by 2.6 percentage points, equivalent to an additional 1.7 million people.
Let me know if this is useful or if you’ve got more questions!
There is a lot of text. Within the 62 page documents there are further links to literature reviews, interviews, etc.
Could someone who has read through all of this (or did the research) give me a few of the most convincing empirical tests/findings that support protests being effective? I kind of want to see more numbers.
I’m gonna copy a section from the “Select Findings” header as you might find some of it useful. I’ll link a few papers to back up each point but there is more in the lit review if you do want to look further.
Our literature review on protest outcomes found:
Voting behaviour across four protest movements was influenced by approximately 1-6 percentage points, observed via natural experiments (Wasow, 2020; Madestam et al., 2013; Teeslink and Melios, 2021).
FWIW I think these findings are quite significant and some of the most empirically robust/
Shifts in public opinion of 2-10% were observed, across both experimental and natural experiment settings (Bugden, 2020; Kenward & Brick, 2019b; Carey et al, 2014).
Sustained interest in novel discourse put forward by Black Lives Matter a year after the majority of protests, and shown to be up to 10x larger than pre-protest activity (Dunivin, 2022; Wasow, 2020 found something similar from the Civil Rights period).
Belgian MPs who were exposed to news articles about protests were more likely to say the issue was high salience, more likely to take a position closer to that of the protesters, and more likely to say they intended to take action on the issue (Wouters and Walgrave, 2017). Reading off their graph, it looks like this changed their position and likelihood of taking action by 0.4 on a 10 point Likert scale (so around 4% increase).
Our bespoke public opinion polling found that disruptive nonviolent climate protest in the UK did not cause any “backfire” effect i.e. there was no negative impact on public support for climate despite disruptive tactics. There’s also weak evidence that it raised the number of people willing to take part in climate activism by 2.6 percentage points, equivalent to an additional 1.7 million people.
Let me know if this is useful or if you’ve got more questions!
Oh right, I guess this would have been easy to find if I didn’t skip straight to the report.