Thank you for writing this, I found it very useful.
You mention that all the studies you looked at involved national protests. So is it fair to say that the takeaway is that we have pretty strong evidence for the efficacy of very large protests in the US, but very little evidence about smaller protest activities?
Another consistency is that all the protests were on issues affecting humans. I wonder if protests about animals can expect to have similar results, given that baseline consideration for animals as relevant stakeholders seems to be quite a bit lower.
Finally, just musing, but I wonder if any studies have looked at patterns of backlash? E.g., BLM protest succeeds in the short term, but then DEI is cancelled by the Trump administration. I suppose there could be backlash to any policy success regardless of how it was accomplished, but one hypothesis could be that protest is a particularly public form of moving your movement forward, and so perhaps particularly likely to draw opposition—although why you would see that years later instead of immediately is not clear, and so maybe this isn’t a very good hypothesis…
So is it fair to say that the takeaway is that we have pretty strong evidence for the efficacy of very large protests in the US, but very little evidence about smaller protest activities?
I think that’s correct. On priors, if large-scale protests work, I would expect smaller protests to work too, but there’s minimal supporting evidence. In this section I gave an argument for why small-scale protests might not work even if nationwide protests do.
I wonder if protests about animals can expect to have similar results, given that baseline consideration for animals as relevant stakeholders seems to be quite a bit lower.
I don’t know, but there’s some evidence about this. Orazani et al. (2021) included some animal welfare protests. It would be possible to do a subgroup analysis comparing the animal vs. human protests.
I wonder if any studies have looked at patterns of backlash? E.g., BLM protest succeeds in the short term, but then DEI is cancelled by the Trump administration.
There are indeed studies on this, but I didn’t review them because none of them are high-quality. Well, Wasow (2020) has high-quality evidence that violent protests backlash, but I think that’s not what you’re talking about; you’re talking about a short-term success followed by a long-term backlash.
Survey evidence from the BLM study actually found the reverse order: protests appeared to have a negative effect on BLM favorability in the weeks following the protests, but by the time of the 2020 election, BLM appeared to have a net positive effect—although I don’t think the study succeeded at establishing causality, so I’m not confident that this is a real effect.
Here’s an example of what I would consider high-quality evidence on this question:
Study uses rainfall method, finds that BLM protests increased support for Democrats in 2020.
However, the same counties showed decreased support for Democrats in 2022.
Thank you for writing this, I found it very useful.
You mention that all the studies you looked at involved national protests. So is it fair to say that the takeaway is that we have pretty strong evidence for the efficacy of very large protests in the US, but very little evidence about smaller protest activities?
Another consistency is that all the protests were on issues affecting humans. I wonder if protests about animals can expect to have similar results, given that baseline consideration for animals as relevant stakeholders seems to be quite a bit lower.
Finally, just musing, but I wonder if any studies have looked at patterns of backlash? E.g., BLM protest succeeds in the short term, but then DEI is cancelled by the Trump administration. I suppose there could be backlash to any policy success regardless of how it was accomplished, but one hypothesis could be that protest is a particularly public form of moving your movement forward, and so perhaps particularly likely to draw opposition—although why you would see that years later instead of immediately is not clear, and so maybe this isn’t a very good hypothesis…
I think that’s correct. On priors, if large-scale protests work, I would expect smaller protests to work too, but there’s minimal supporting evidence. In this section I gave an argument for why small-scale protests might not work even if nationwide protests do.
I don’t know, but there’s some evidence about this. Orazani et al. (2021) included some animal welfare protests. It would be possible to do a subgroup analysis comparing the animal vs. human protests.
There are indeed studies on this, but I didn’t review them because none of them are high-quality. Well, Wasow (2020) has high-quality evidence that violent protests backlash, but I think that’s not what you’re talking about; you’re talking about a short-term success followed by a long-term backlash.
Survey evidence from the BLM study actually found the reverse order: protests appeared to have a negative effect on BLM favorability in the weeks following the protests, but by the time of the 2020 election, BLM appeared to have a net positive effect—although I don’t think the study succeeded at establishing causality, so I’m not confident that this is a real effect.
Here’s an example of what I would consider high-quality evidence on this question:
Study uses rainfall method, finds that BLM protests increased support for Democrats in 2020.
However, the same counties showed decreased support for Democrats in 2022.
There are no studies like that, as far as I know.