(in)Effectiveness of Modern Mass Demonstrations / Protests

The country is experiencing a surge in protests with little tangible results despite raising awareness. A study found most major protests from 2017-2022 had no impact on changing minds or electoral behavior, with the exception of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Protests have become more frequent but less strategically organized, relying too heavily on street demonstrations rather than behind-the-scenes organizing. Movement leaders have lost their ability to promote an overall message as media attention, especially on social media, flocks to the most radical and provocative voices on the fringes. There are concerns that repeatedly ineffective protests could undermine faith in democracy if people lose belief in their ability to create change through democratic means.

The Problem With America’s Protest Feedback Loop
The country is stuck in a protest feedback loop. In recent months, students opposed to the Israel-Gaza war have occupied lawns and buildings at college campuses across the country. Emulating climate activists who have stopped traffic on crucial roadways, pro-Palestine demonstrators have blocked access to major airports. For months, the protests intensified as university, U.S., and Israeli policies seemed unmoved. Frustrated by their inefficacy, the protesters redoubled their efforts and escalated their tactics.

The lack of immediate outcomes from the Gaza protests is not at all unusual. In a new working paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Amory Gethin of the Paris School of Economics and Vincent Pons of Harvard Business School analyzed the effect of 14 social movements in the United States from 2017 to 2022. They varied in size: About 12,000 people marched against a potential war with Iran in January 2020; 4.2 million turned out for the first Women’s March. Pons told me that these large social movements succeeded in raising the general public’s awareness of their issues, something that he and Gethin measured through Google Trends and data from X.

Yet in nearly every case that the researchers examined in detail—including the Women’s March and the pro–gun control March for Our Lives, which brought out more than 3 million demonstrators—they could find no evidence that protesters changed minds or affected electoral behavior.

As the marginal cost of reaching hundreds of thousands, even millions, of potential protesters drops to zero, organizers have mastered the art of gaining attention through public demonstrations. Mass actions no longer require organized groups with members who pay dues, professional staffers who plan targeted actions, and designated leaders who can negotiate with public officials. They just need someone who can make a good Instagram graphic. But notwithstanding the clear benefits of social media for protest participants, the lure of racking up views on TikTok or X and getting on the homepage of major news sites can overwhelm other strategic goals. Protests are crowding out the array of other organizing tools that social movements need in order to be successful—and that has consequences for our entire political system.

The Gethin and Pons study about the inefficacy of modern American mass movements identified one glaring exception: the protests over George Floyd’s murder. In the summer of 2020, nearly 2 million people participated in more than 5,000 separate racial-justice protests in the United States. Gethin and Pons found that after the protests, Americans expressed “more liberal answers on racial issues.” They also appeared more likely to vote in the upcoming presidential election and less likely to vote for then-President Donald Trump. This finding about the effectiveness of the 2020 anti-racism protests on the American public is supported by other research.

Policy change did occur in the aftermath of these protests. The Brennan Center for Justice found that, in the year following Floyd’s death, half of American states enacted legislation regarding use-of-force standards, police-misconduct policies, or both.

Another reason the BLM protests succeeded is that they were overwhelmingly peaceful—despite some high-profile outbreaks of violence in cities such as Minneapolis, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. According to research by Chenoweth and the political scientist Jeremy Pressman, more than 96 percent of the 2020 racial-justice protests resulted in no property damage or police injury, while nearly 98 percent resulted in zero reports of injuries among participants, bystanders, and police.

The Floyd protests did not materialize out of nowhere. The intellectual foundation had been laid by years of previous protests that created some organizational infrastructure and steadily increased the public’s support for the BLM movement until it surged upward in June 2020. Perhaps the other movements in the Gethin and Pons sample will prepare the way for future actions when the circumstances are ripe.

Still, many movements seeking to capitalize on public attention find themselves trampled underneath its power. Media attention flocks to the most radical and provocative elements and emboldens the voices on the fringes. Movement leaders have lost their ability to promote an overall message. Not surprisingly, despite the full slate of potential reforms that could have gained traction after Floyd’s murder, the slogan that everyone remembers is “Defund the police”—a policy demand that represented just a minority of voters’ views even as the majority of Americans were calling for far-reaching reforms of police departments. Who can credibly claim to speak for the campus protesters who oppose the war in Gaza?

Even though nobody knows who the leaders are, some of the protesters’ positions do seem to resonate off campus: Morning Consult polling from late last month suggests that 60 percent of Americans support a cease-fire, 58 percent support humanitarian aid to Palestinians, and fewer than half of voters support military aid to Israel.

While even entirely nonviolent protests cannot count on public support, escalatory actions such as trespassing, vandalism, and property destruction undermine and distract from broadly shared goals. People in left-leaning movements know full well that some of their own supporters are undermining message discipline and strategic imperatives. Groups critical of Israel have tried to organize boycotts of a handful of companies that, in their view, have been complicit in harming Palestinians. But among sympathizers on social media, perhaps the most prominent boycott target has been Starbucks, which is not on the list.

Yet even as the burden is on protest organizers to articulate clear, feasible policy and persuade their fellow citizens to go along, everyone should be concerned if protesters whose demands have substantial support fail time and again to register gains in Washington. Civil unrest is inherently delegitimizing to a government. Protests are in part a rejection of traditional methods of registering opinion. Their increasing regularity indicates that people believe voting and calling their representatives are insufficient. In fact, many people who participated in the 2020 protests—both the Floyd ones and the anti-lockdown ones—did not end up voting in the presidential election that year.

But the disorder that Biden warned against is not just a matter of college students getting graduation canceled this year; it’s also a matter of some Americans deciding over time that voting may not be worthwhile. Polls suggest that the public is deeply dissatisfied with how the U.S. political system is working. A feedback loop in which demonstrations proliferate to little effect, while radicalized protesters become ever more disillusioned with democracy, is a dangerous one. If you’re worried about the disorder on college campuses now, imagine if Americans lose faith in the power of democratic voice altogether.