Short and long-term effects of disruptive animal rights protest (Social Change Lab)

We’re excited to announce important new research on disruptive animal rights protests that Social Change Lab has been working on over the last few months. We investigated the short and longer-term impacts of Animal Rising’s protests at the Grand National horse race in 2023, by conducting nationally representative polling just before, just after, and again six months after the protests, alongside a controlled experiment, media impact analyses, and mobilisation analyses. You can read the results of the data we gathered immediately after the protest in our previous report, but our new report includes interesting findings on the longer-term effects of that protest.

In the immediate aftermath of the Grand National protest, people’s awareness of the protest was linked to worsened attitudes towards animals — the more somebody heard about the protest, the worse their attitudes became. Yet these negative effects were no longer seen six months later. This indicates that a high-profile disruptive protest, such as the Grand National disruption, triggers a strong emotional reaction that alters how people think about related issues for a short while. After some time has passed however, there is no longer any particular effect of having seen or heard about the protest. Encouragingly, comparing one nationally representative sample’s responses before the Grand National protest to another independent sample six months later shows overall positive shifts. A possible conclusion is that the effects of the protests in the short term were to make people feel angry with the protesters and their methods, whereas over the longer term, as the anger has waned, the percolation of the idea that we as a society have an unacceptable relationship with animals has remained. However, it has to be stressed that the overall positive shifts could also be due to factors unrelated to Animal Rising’s actions, so it would not be justified to claim (with certainty) that Animal Rising’s protests caused this positive development, even though it is intuitive that they at least contributed. Our findings highlight the need to measure the longer-term effects of protest and have important implications for activists, because they indicate that initially negative reactions to disruptive protests, which are often highlighted by media outlets, do not translate to lasting backfire effects which could hinder progress on the issue.