Thread by @JamesOzOz

Social Change Lab is excited to release a summary of our last 6 months of research into the outcomes of protest movements! We reviewed 60+ academic papers, conducted our own public opinion polling, interviewed 15 academics, experts and policymakers, and more.

What we found 🧵

There’s strong evidence that protest can influence public discourse e.g. media coverage and discussion of certain topics. One example is from Dunivin (2022) below, where Black Lives Matter led to increased interest in novel terms such as systemic racism and mass incarceration.

There’s quite strong evidence that protest movements can significantly influence voting behaviour. Wasow (2020) below shows how nonviolent protests in the 1960s resulted in more votes for the Democrats. Teeselink & Melios find this to be true again for BLM in 2020.

There’s somewhat strong evidence that protest can positively influence public opinion. Kenward & Brick (unpublished) shows statistically significant increases in the number of people who were concerned about the climate crisis due to XR. YouGov also finds similar results!

Our opinion polling for @JustStopOil found no backfire or harmful effects, despite disruptive tactics reaching 60% of the population. We also found weak evidence that willingness to engage in climate activism increased by 2.6 percentage points, equivalent to 1.7 million people

We interviewed 3 UK Civil servants who thought that some groups had led to significant policy change in the UK. Examples given were Extinction Rebellion who might have sped up net-zero commitments, and anti-live export campaigns who played a large role in ending live export.

We also interviewed 6 academics who research protest and social movements. They thought that whilst complex, protests can definitely have significant impacts:

“The main consensus is that protest matters, but there isn’t consensus on why protest matters.”

I highly recommended diving into our report for more details! We’ve tried to keep it fairly accessible, whilst linking to further information for the keen beans. Check it out here:
socialchangelab.org/research

Caveats - causal inferences for protest movements are hard, especially for long-term impacts! Also, policymakers don’t want to attribute impact to protest movements, which makes it hard to measure. Despite that, most of our work points in the same direction (positive impact)

Additionally, we (and most research) look at the most influential protest movements. Just because some have large impacts, doesn’t mean they all do! It’s certainly not easy to do, and our next report will look at why some social movements are more successful than others.

If you wanna follow more of our work, check out our website! As above, we have an upcoming report on factors that make some protest movements more successful than others - obviously another big question.

socialchangelab.org

["fun" AI-generated pictures of climate protest]

Any questions or comments - feel free to reach out! and engage/comment here: forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6WKBi5C9…