Omar Wasow | @owasow@bsky.social Profile picture
Oct 3, 2020 11 tweets 4 min read Read on X
New cross-national study finds “nonviolent tactics strongly increase movement support relative to violent tactics & preference for nonviolent resistance is primarily driven by intrinsic commitments to the moral superiority of nonviolence.” 🧵 researchgate.net/profile/Jonath…
5000 survey participants in 33 countries were presented with “a fictional vignette described as a recent news article about a public demonstration against an autocratic regime.” The vignette randomly varied protester tactics, repression by regime & movement success. 2/
Subjects were then asked would you support the movement? Do you imagine a citizen of that country would support the movement? Do you imagine citizens would join the protests? Would you donate? 3/
To get at whether support was motivated more by “intrinsic logic” (justice) vs “instrumental logic” (success), subjects were also asked whether government and/or protesters “have justice on their side,” and whether government and/or protesters were expected “to win.” 4/
The study found “a substantial effect of nonviolent resistance on the tendency to support, support as imagined citizen, join, and donate to the movement.” Also, support “is not conditioned by expectations about potential success.” 5/
Government repression “is negatively associated with most indicators of protest support, including stated support, stated support as citizen and willingness to join the movement.” However, “willingness to donate increases when protest movements are reported to be repressed.” 6/
In sum, the study both substantiates a range of prior work on differential effects of nonviolent versus violent protest tactics and contributes to our understanding of the individual-level psychology that motivates broader support for social movements.
I highly recommend following the authors of the study, too:
For a summary of my research on 1960s civil rights protests, see:
Someone asked how these results from an online survey experiment might map to the real world. For an excellent example of how protest tactics influence popular support, I recommend the paper ”If a fight starts, watch the crowd.” Brief summary, here:
Survey experiment on protest tactics and repression finds “Women appear to be much more swayed by nonviolent resistance than men. The average treatment effect for women is almost double that for men across most measures.” researchgate.net/publication/34…

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More from @owasow

May 30, 2023
New study finds “strong evidence that BLM protests were associated with an increased likelihood of voting for the 2020 Democratic candidate.” Further, this effect was “concentrated among less contentious protest events (with arrests, injury, or violence).” tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… ImageImageImage
Study of BLM also uses weather and commute times to address possible unobserved factors as protests more likely “when weather is good and built environment favors local gatherings… factors likely to impact variation in protests but not Democratic voting.” tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.108… ImageImageImage
At both county- and individual-level, study finds “strong support for hypothesis BLM protest intensity was associated with greater support for Biden. Evidence on contentious protest is mixed, with a significant negative effect in county analysis but no relationship in survey.” Image
Read 4 tweets
Feb 27, 2023
A strange and ahistorical op-ed on SF's ills that spends a precious paragraph on dangers of ranked choice voting but has nothing to say about what policy changes are needed to build more housing, an issue that long precedes current “one party rule.” nytimes.com/2023/02/26/opi…
A century ago, Bay Area was ground zero for the development of single family zoning as a method to enforce racial segregation in housing.
California’s housing crisis is the result of bad policy over decades on both left and right but counter-mobilization against integrated neighborhoods and fair housing laws was not championed by liberals.
Read 5 tweets
Feb 2, 2023
Has any region offered a Pay-to-NIMBY option? Like a surtax for non-development?

“The privilege of vetoing virtually any housing in rich neighborhoods is so ingrained in American culture that many people believe it is one of their inalienable rights.” sfchronicle.com/opinion/openfo…
Idea is to shift NIMBYism debates from “rights” to privileges. Imagine upzoning a whole city but with option for any neighborhood to pay an ongoing lower-upzone surtax. Wealthier neighborhoods then pay price for NIMBYism in a way that might also subsidize more affordable housing.
Shifting from property taxes to land value tax would be simpler and more efficient than “NIMBYism surtax” but I’m trying to imagine what might reduce conflict within current system and between city-level pushes to upzone and neighborhood-level opposition. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_valu…
Read 4 tweets
Jan 7, 2023
“It seemed absolutely crazy. The idea that an Iowa housewife, equipped with the cutting-edge medical tool known as Google Images, would make a medical discovery about a pro athlete who sees doctors and athletic trainers as part of her job?” propublica.org/article/muscul… Image
For more about Jill Viles, follow her at @jillviles or see diyscientist.blog

Also, if you liked this piece, I recommend following @DavidEpstein.
For more on sports and genetics, nature versus nurture and other hot debates on the science of performance (10,000 hours?), see @DavidEpstein’s book The Sports Gene. The Guardian called it “dazzling and illuminating.” amazon.com/Sports-Gene-Ma…
Read 4 tweets
Dec 31, 2022
Our immune systems are not so much like armies as traffic cops. When we’re well, past infections often linger but are kept in check. As thread shows, chronic illnesses—like ME/CFS and Long Covid—are plausibly persistent, harmful infections that remain hard to detect and suppress.
Long term infections can also result in damage to tissues which may then be diagnosed as a new illness like cervical instability. @jenbrea notes “infection is actually one risk factor of cervical damage that has the most support in the medical literature.” jenbrea.medium.com/how-infection-…
“Compression, stretch, or deformation of nerve tissue can cause low blood flow to the brain and spinal cord that results in a host of downstream metabolic consequences like low oxygen, a switch to anaerobic metabolism, increased lactate, and inflammation.” jenbrea.medium.com/how-infection-…
Read 4 tweets
Dec 29, 2022
Just successfully converted a pdf and OCR’d two paper book chapters to machine readable plain text. Then fed text to Amazon’s Polly service and now have good-enough “audiobooks.” Did it for myself but realize one day could be offered to class like podcast with weekly “episodes.”
Listen to Narrative in Political Science by Molly Patterson and Kristen Renwick Monroe as read by one of Amazon Polly’s British female voices (I’m not sure if British voices are actually better than US or if foreign dialectic just seems less robotic). dropbox.com/s/uwpikkyzz3cg…
Pre-processing pdf or OCR’d text is time consuming and doesn’t really save time. For text-to-voice reading to be pleasant, it’s helpful to clean things like hyphens vs m-dashes, remove footnote numbers, correct some garbled text, etc. Some of this can be automated but not all.
Read 4 tweets

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