Interesting write up! Thanks for producing it. If effective altruism is going to do more political interventions we should also have a good evidence based understanding of what works and why.
Speaking of the why.. do we know what the mechanism is for the effectiveness of protests? I can imagine a few possibilities.
Protests raise the salience of the issue in the media, producing the appearance of popular/widespread/intense support, which affects the behavior of voters and policymakers.
Protests affect the behavior of protesters themselves, making them more involved in political action and more committed to the particular cause in question.
Protests create an opportunity to discuss issues within protester’s own social networks, which has some influence. The act of protesting here is just taking some personal cost to show commitment to the cause within ones community.
I assume the reality is far more complicated than these ideas above, and probably somewhat unknowable. But, what do we know?
I don’t know much about the mechanisms, but based on the evidence I reviewed, I can say a few things:
Protests do attract media coverage. I don’t know how important that media coverage is.
If you look at Table 2 in my post, I listed the effect of protests in terms of votes per protester. The studies in Table 2 found that one protester caused 3–12 people to change their votes (or to go from not voting → voting), so the effect can’t just come from the behavior of protesters themselves. The BLM study also measured votes per protester but I didn’t include it because it failed to establish causality.
Let’s presume for a minute that the BLM study found a causal relationship. It found a smaller effect than the other studies (fewer votes per protester). It also controlled for non-local effects, so it only measured the effects of protests in a county with vote changes in the same county. Perhaps the smaller effect in the BLM study is due to between-protest variation or confounding variables, but it might be that non-local effects account for most of the impact of protests. The study’s replication data is publicly available so it should be possible to test this.
Edit: Social Change Lab also has a review on what types of protests are most effective. I haven’t reviewed the evidence in detail but my sense is it’s mostly weak; still better than no evidence.
Interesting write up! Thanks for producing it. If effective altruism is going to do more political interventions we should also have a good evidence based understanding of what works and why.
Speaking of the why.. do we know what the mechanism is for the effectiveness of protests? I can imagine a few possibilities.
Protests raise the salience of the issue in the media, producing the appearance of popular/widespread/intense support, which affects the behavior of voters and policymakers.
Protests affect the behavior of protesters themselves, making them more involved in political action and more committed to the particular cause in question.
Protests create an opportunity to discuss issues within protester’s own social networks, which has some influence. The act of protesting here is just taking some personal cost to show commitment to the cause within ones community.
I assume the reality is far more complicated than these ideas above, and probably somewhat unknowable. But, what do we know?
I don’t know much about the mechanisms, but based on the evidence I reviewed, I can say a few things:
Protests do attract media coverage. I don’t know how important that media coverage is.
If you look at Table 2 in my post, I listed the effect of protests in terms of votes per protester. The studies in Table 2 found that one protester caused 3–12 people to change their votes (or to go from not voting → voting), so the effect can’t just come from the behavior of protesters themselves. The BLM study also measured votes per protester but I didn’t include it because it failed to establish causality.
Let’s presume for a minute that the BLM study found a causal relationship. It found a smaller effect than the other studies (fewer votes per protester). It also controlled for non-local effects, so it only measured the effects of protests in a county with vote changes in the same county. Perhaps the smaller effect in the BLM study is due to between-protest variation or confounding variables, but it might be that non-local effects account for most of the impact of protests. The study’s replication data is publicly available so it should be possible to test this.
Edit: Social Change Lab also has a review on what types of protests are most effective. I haven’t reviewed the evidence in detail but my sense is it’s mostly weak; still better than no evidence.