Nice! Very cool research idea and very interesting findings. From a skim and without having thought too hard about it, the methodology and setup seems more careful and higher quality than what I remember of your previous survey too, so nice job on that!
This roughly fits with my somewhat indirect inferences from some of the research I did on how media coverage and public opinion influence each other and policy-making. (Other relevant points here.) I’d expect more radical tactics to be good at forcing an issue onto the public and policy agenda, but not good (possibly counterproductive) at persuading unsupportive members of the public to change their mind. Your evidence on polarisation supports this, I think. And if it such protests do indeed increase support for more moderate groups, as your study suggests, then that gives them more influence to negotiate with policy-makers.
My inferences are getting even more indirect now, but an implication of this is that radical campaigns targeted towards issues that the public are already supportive of would be helpful for forcing change, but not so helpful and perhaps counterproductive on issues where there isn’t already popular support. (This might be bad news for groups like Animal Rebellion.)
Thanks for the kind words! Our new Director of Research did all the analysis for this (I still did the methodology) and he’s quite a whiz at data analysis, so he can take all the credit for that side of things!
Good to know that it fits in well with your previous findings. I also think this supports a similar loose set of hypotheses I had going into this.
Re it being less good for issues with low levels of public support, I think what you say is broadly true, with a caveat. I think for issues with low public support, it’s not often that there is a big base of people who oppose an issue and we slowly win people other; Instead, I think it’s more like that most of the population don’t really have a view, and using radical tactics, you’re getting them to actually form a view on an issue. I think the best example for me of this is the chart below, which shows public support for BLM (the group, not the issue) post-George Floyd protests. I think Animal Rebellion does similar stuff—It will turn a bunch of people off, it will probably attract some people, but ultimately it’s getting a lot more people to actually take a stance. Obviously the balance of this is important, and something that it doesn’t feel like we have great evidence on.
Nice! Very cool research idea and very interesting findings. From a skim and without having thought too hard about it, the methodology and setup seems more careful and higher quality than what I remember of your previous survey too, so nice job on that!
This roughly fits with my somewhat indirect inferences from some of the research I did on how media coverage and public opinion influence each other and policy-making. (Other relevant points here.) I’d expect more radical tactics to be good at forcing an issue onto the public and policy agenda, but not good (possibly counterproductive) at persuading unsupportive members of the public to change their mind. Your evidence on polarisation supports this, I think. And if it such protests do indeed increase support for more moderate groups, as your study suggests, then that gives them more influence to negotiate with policy-makers.
My inferences are getting even more indirect now, but an implication of this is that radical campaigns targeted towards issues that the public are already supportive of would be helpful for forcing change, but not so helpful and perhaps counterproductive on issues where there isn’t already popular support. (This might be bad news for groups like Animal Rebellion.)
Thanks for the kind words! Our new Director of Research did all the analysis for this (I still did the methodology) and he’s quite a whiz at data analysis, so he can take all the credit for that side of things!
Good to know that it fits in well with your previous findings. I also think this supports a similar loose set of hypotheses I had going into this.
Re it being less good for issues with low levels of public support, I think what you say is broadly true, with a caveat. I think for issues with low public support, it’s not often that there is a big base of people who oppose an issue and we slowly win people other; Instead, I think it’s more like that most of the population don’t really have a view, and using radical tactics, you’re getting them to actually form a view on an issue. I think the best example for me of this is the chart below, which shows public support for BLM (the group, not the issue) post-George Floyd protests. I think Animal Rebellion does similar stuff—It will turn a bunch of people off, it will probably attract some people, but ultimately it’s getting a lot more people to actually take a stance. Obviously the balance of this is important, and something that it doesn’t feel like we have great evidence on.