How effective are protests? Some research and some nuance
It’s been a fairly busy time at Social Change Lab over the past few weeks! As it’s very relevant to one of the focuses of this blog, understanding social movement strategies, I’ll provide an update on some of our work understanding the effectiveness of protest and protest movements (plus some additional nuance and commentary that doesn’t fit neatly into external articles). The key things I’ll talk about in this post:
An article I recently published in Stanford Social Innovation Review about some of our research on protest movements, and tangible giving opportunities for funders interested in supporting movements.
Sam Glover (my great colleague) published an article for Faunalytics, on how the animal movement could better implement protests, using evidence from our literature reviews.
A summary of the literature reviews we completed recently, examining 60+ academic studies on protest.
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“Protest movements could be more effective than the best charities” - SSIR
About two weeks ago, I published an article in Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR), a magazine for those interested in philanthropy, social science and non-profits. I highly recommend checking out SSIR more broadly, it has some great pieces on ecologies of change, questions that transformed a movement, and much more. If you need any inspiration to read my article, check out this incredibly nice tweet from Kevin Starr, CEO of the Mulago foundation.
Although my article is reasonably brief (and I obviously recommend reading it in full!) here’s a quick summary of what I spoke about, plus some nuances I forgot or wasn’t able to add:
Even the most successful and well-known protest movements receive vastly less funding than established charities in the same space. This is true for organisations such as The Sunrise Movement or Extinction Rebellion, and the difference can be on the order of 100x or even more, depending on the organisations you look at.
Nuance I didn’t add: Whilst I think this is generally the case, there are some exceptions to the rule. For example, Black Lives Matter, which raised approximately $5 million in 2016, also raised an exceptional $90 million in 2020. This latter figure is larger than the income of the biggest civil rights organisation in the US, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), at approximately $30 million.
Another bit of nuance I didn’t mention, that Johannes Ackva pointed out to me afterwards, is that receiving less funding relative to other bodies doesn’t necessarily mean you’re underfunded. Underfunded implies you have the ability to achieve much more, but the main limiting factor to your impact is funding. I do believe being underfunded is the case for some movements (not all) and it would have been good to explore this more in the article if I had a longer word limit! The key reasons I believe this, in brief, are that organisations like XR have previously run out of money and had to lose 200 paid volunteers, severely curtailing their impact, and had many great organisers leave due to low wages and financial insecurity.
On being underfunded, I think organiser churn due to financial insecurity is a very common problem for movements, and one that additional funding could easily (and cost-effectively) fix. There are some downsides to additional wages for paid volunteers, but that’s a big topic I’ll save for another day.
There is a reasonable amount of evidence that shows that protest movement can have significant impacts, across a variety of outcomes from policy, public opinion, public discourse, voting behaviour, and corporate behaviour. I’ll leave this point to be explained in greater detail in our summary of our literature review on protest outcomes!
Nuance I didn’t add: In my opinion, protest is massively hits-based, in that most grassroots movement organisations will amount to very little, but the most successful ones could transform society dramatically. So whilst movement can sometimes be game-changing, the difficulty is understanding which ones will do this, and how to increase our odds of success.
I see funding social movements as quite similar to venture capital, in that it seems reasonable to invest in a wide portfolio of movements trying a variety of strategies, and the ones that become unicorns (i.e. they win big) will have enough impact to justify your spending across your portfolio. This feels especially true as it’s currently not obvious how to a priori predict which movements will be successful. We’re doing some work in this space on predictors of successful movements however so watch this space!
There are some clear ways that funders can support social movements, whether that’s through funding movement infrastructure (e.g. incubators, capacity building orgs and trainings - see examples in article), supporting movements directly or funding regranting efforts.
Nuance I didn’t add: It’s not obvious to me that there are amazing or impactful social movement organisations to give to currently (e.g. high expected value / cost-effectiveness, clear funding gaps AND good counterfactual donations), in the realm of climate and animal advocacy. I’m quite uncertain about what factors make a successful social movement, so I hesitate to recommend any orgs directly. Instead, I think movement infrastructure, research into strategies and other ‘meta’ work seems like a safe and useful bet.
In addition, I think for risk-averse (for legal or PR reasons) funders supporting movement infrastructure or greater research into movement strategies could be a good choice.
Some groups I’m particularly excited about in the movement infrastructure realm are:
Future Matters Project - Doing movement-building with Effective Altruist principles for the climate movement in Germany
Ayni Institute - Training & knowledge-sharing around Momentum-Driven Organising, and the inspiration for a lot of my work!
Climate2025 - Supplying services (e.g. fiscal hosting, fundraising support) and running a climate movement incubator - I know relatively less about their work so take this one with a bigger pinch of salt.
Gladly welcome any feedback on this article and if anyone is curious to chat more, whether that’s about research, philanthropic advising or movement consulting, you can always reach me at james@socialchangelab.org.
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2. “Effective Advocacy For Animals Through Protest” - Faunalytics
My great colleague, Sam Glover, wrote an article for Faunalytics, on how those within the animal advocacy movement could employ protests more effectively. It’s slightly more academic and comprehensive than my SSIR article, so I recommend it for those who are keen to get into the literature a bit more. In short:
Nonviolent protests tend to be much more effective in achieving their outcomes relative to violent protests.
The ‘WUNC’ model, containing Worthiness, Unity, Numbers and Commitment, seems to be a good indication of the success of protests. Most importantly, a study on Belgian politicians found that Numbers (the size of a protest) and Unity (how unified the message of the protests was) were the most important factors in shaping policymaker opinions. See more on this in this paper by Wouters and Walgrave (2017).
A large open question seems to be on the use of ‘extreme’ protests, and whether they are useful or not. In an aptly named paper, The Activist’s Dilemma, the authors find that exposure to extreme protests (even when non-violent e.g. breaking into an animal-testing facility) in an experimentally controlled setting had a negative effect on support for the movement goals, also known as a backfire effect. The reason why the authors label the use of extreme actions as a dilemma is due to the fact that more extreme or disruptive actions are much more likely to receive media coverage, and therefore raise the salience of your issue, but they could also lead to a loss in support for your cause.
However, another experimental study by Bugden (2020) finds the opposite — that disruptive civil disobedience in the climate movement context increases public support slightly (see figure below), which adds some confusion to the mix. In addition, observational results from disruptive civil disobedience show positive, rather than negative, effects, so the jury is seemingly out on exactly how disruption and ‘extremity’ within movement activities impact public opinion.
Bugden (2020) showing the effectiveness of various protest strategies in an experimental vignette design, based on climate protests in the US.
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3. A summary of Social Change Lab’s literature reviews, who we are, and our next steps
We’ve recently conducted two literature reviews, looking over 60+ academic studies across political science, sociology and economics, to tackle some key questions around protest movements. Specifically, we had two main questions:
What are the outcomes of protest and protest movements? - Literature Review
What factors make some protest movements more likely to succeed relative to others? - Literature Review
You can see the same summary of our work as below, plus some additional content such as interviews we conducted with grantmakers and our next steps, on the EA Forum here. We’re currently gathering feedback on these reviews and aim to update and iterate them over the next few months. As always, feedback is welcome.
Summary of Literature Review on protest outcomes
We have found research that leads us to believe it is likely that there is a causal impact of non-violent protest in positively affecting public opinion, voting behaviour, media coverage and policy. The summary of our literature review that highlights some of these points is as below, where you can see the full literature review here. A database of relevant research papers we’ve included in this research can be seen here. It’s important to note that this is the first draft of our literature reviews, pre-feedback from relevant experts, so it’s likely they’ll be refined and improved going forward. Feedback and comments are very much welcome, on this post or via email.
Whilst positive effects of protest on public opinion, public discourse and voting behaviour have moderate evidence supporting each outcome, effects of protest on policymaking and policymakers are more mixed.[2] Specifically, impacts of protest on policy seems highly context dependent, on factors such as existing political structures and current public opinion.
There is some debate whether protest influences political attitudes, or it simply amplifies existing public preferences, with various studies lending support to both arguments.
The effect sizes of protest on public opinion and voting behaviour are somewhat small, yet quite significant in the realm of politics, with shifts of approximately 2-5% found via natural experiments. In the studies we examined, there were noticeable impacts on electoral outcomes as a result of protest activity. In experimental conditions, effect sizes have been found to be both null and larger than 5%, depending on the study.
There is strong evidence that protest can be effective in North America and Western Europe, specifically within issues of civil rights, climate change, and social welfare. For countries in the Global South, there is very little research into protest outcomes, so generalising these findings to other regions is quite tenuous.
We think that the evidence for short-term and medium-term change is much stronger than the evidence for long-term change. This is largely because research designs that are able to make causal inferences are almost necessarily short-term - research using experiments or quasi-experimental designs largely examine short-term or medium-term effects. There is currently very little literature on the long-term impacts of protest on public opinion or public discourse.
Summary Table
Note: Confidence ratings are based on the number of available studies supporting the claim. Low = 0-2 studies supporting, or mixed evidence; Medium = 3-6 studies supporting; High = 7+ studies supporting.
This initial review of the literature suggests to us that it is highly plausible that protest is an effective strategy in some cases, and that it is worth exploring the possibility that protest is more cost-effective than current EA recommendations. Again, we encourage interested folks to read the full literature review on protest outcomes here.
Summary of Literature Review on protest movement success factors
We believe that there is moderate evidence that the protesters are more likely to succeed if they are perceived as a diverse group, if they have a unified message, and if the number of protesters is high.
The factors that influence the public are slightly different to factors that influence policymakers. Namely, the public is much more concerned about the worthiness of protestors, whilst policymakers are more influenced by the numbers of protestors and the diversity of groups present.
We believe that there is strong evidence that non-violent protest is preferable to violent protest for achieving desired outcomes. There have been multiple studies that indicate that peaceful protesters are more likely to persuade the public - including Wasow (2020) and Feinberg et al. (2017).
The political context in which a protest takes place is also relevant: there is some evidence that protesters are more likely to achieve their aims if they highlight an issue about which the public is already on their side, and that they are more likely to have an influence at the early stages of the legislative process rather than the later stages. We believe in some cases, the political context might be important enough to dominate over factors within the movement’s control, whereby detrimental external conditions might lead to failure regardless of how well the movement crafts its strategies or tactics.
There is generally not much literature on this topic, with many possible areas for future study to understand best practices for social movements and protest.
You can see our full literature review on protest movement success factors here.