Wednesday, 03 July 2024
Wednesday, 03 July 2024
Global surge in protests
A report published by Nature magazine on June 26, headlined ‘The science of protests: how to shape public opinion and swing votes’, talks about a global surge in protests. And it has a photograph from the 2020 farmers’ protests in India as its lead image.
Various global and local issues have sparked demonstrations – the Israel-Hamas conflict, new agricultural rules in countries like Germany, Belgium, and India, and demands for higher wages symbolised by the burning of Olympic rings in Paris – the article notes.
In the article, researchers highlighted that protests have nearly tripled between 2006 and 2020 around the world.
"That increase in activism has eclipsed even the turbulent 1960s," the magazine quoted professor Lisa Mueller from Macalester College in Minnesota as saying.
Success factor
Research shows that protests can influence media coverage, public opinion, policy, and politics, at least in the short term, the article said. Studies suggest that civil-rights protests in the 1960s and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020 changed voting behaviour and even flipped elections, although not always in the way that protesters intended. Protests can also help to spur longer-term changes in public opinion — yet such influences are harder to trace, Nature acknowledged.
Researchers are gaining insights into which factors boost the impact of demonstrations and other campaigns.
Large protests seem more effective than small ones; non-violent protests appear to be more potent than violent ones; unified goals might achieve more than diffused demands do.
Repression — by police, for instance — can win more support for protesters. Some researchers are trying to use the findings to help activists and social movements. "Social protest and larger-scale social action is a way to generate social change — but that doesn’t mean it always will," professor Eric Shuman from New York University told Nature.
Turbulent times
In 2013, researchers built a global protest database by scouring news reports from about 100 countries, revealing a significant rise in protests reported between 2006 and 2020, according to Nature.
Some of the largest protests in history occurred during this period, including the 2020 strike against the CAA-NRC citizenship matrix in India involving 250 million people, and the Black Lives Matter protests.
Research indicates non-violent protests, like the Philippines' People Power Revolution, are more effective at achieving regime change than violent ones.
American political scientist and Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth's studies show that movements mobilising at least 3.5 percent of a population are usually successful.
The Rain Effect
Proving that protests cause downstream events is challenging, as "it’s very hard to prove causality," Omar Wasow, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told Nature. Chenoweth addressed this by examining unexpected government changes within a year of peak protests.
Another method involves using rainfall randomness as a natural experiment, showing that rain reduces protest participation. Researchers compare areas with sudden rain (fewer protests) to similar areas without rain (more protests).
Wasow used this approach to study the 1960s civil-rights protests, analysing rainfall in April 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. He found that places with less rainfall had more violent protests, leading to a 1.5–7.9 percent shift in white votes towards the Republican party.
Violent protests "likely tipped the election" to Richard Nixon, Wasow said.
Conversely, a 2021 study showed that mostly peaceful Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were linked to a 1.2–1.8 per cent increase in Democratic votes in the November election.
Chenoweth noted that social media is also changing the rules by capturing more protest data.
What can drive change
Activists achieve more concessions with cohesive demands, suggested Lisa Mueller's research. For example, London’s 2010 Take Back Parliament campaign, which pushed for electoral reform with coordinated slogans, stimulated a UK referendum in 2011, although the reforms were rejected by voters.
In contrast, Occupy London in 2011, part of the global Occupy movement, was criticised for its wide-ranging and incoherent demands.
