PROTEST OUTCOMES LITERATURE REVIEW (Social Change Lab)

This report contains a summary which is reproduced below.

SUMMARY

• 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. 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.