Because people hate the rain. They realized they could use this weather difference to assess the impact of the protests: If the absence of rain means bigger protests, and bigger protests actually make a difference, then local political outcomes ought to depend on whether or not it rained that day.
As it turns out, protest size really does matter. According to their research, rallies in congressional districts that experienced good weather on Tax Day had higher turnouts, which led to more conservative voting by the district representative and a substantially higher turnout for the Republican candidate in the congressional election. Specifically, every additional attendee at a Tax Day rally led to somewhere between 7 and 14 additional votes for the Republican in the next election.
The researchers argue that this was not the result of the actual protest, but of the way it motivated attendees. If the protest itself made the difference, they point out, then the effect of a larger protest would dissipate over time as policymakers forgot about it. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
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Get help. Do Protests Work? By Sam Bellefy. Movements, and their protests, are powerful because they change the minds of people, including those who may not even be participating in them, and they change the lives of their participants.
In the long term, protests work because they can undermine the most important pillar of power: legitimacy. Commentators often note that a state can be defined by its monopoly on violence, a concept going back to the philosopher Thomas Hobbes and codified by the sociologist Max Weber. But the full Weber quote is less well known. The Soviet Union did not fall because it ran out of tanks to send to Eastern Europe when the people there rebelled in the late s.
It fell, in large part, because it ran out of legitimacy, and because Soviet rulers had lost the will and the desire to live in their own system.
If the loss of legitimacy is widespread and deep enough, the generals and police who are supposed to be enacting the violence can and do turn against the rulers or, at least, they stop defending the unpopular ruler. Force and repression can keep things under control for a while, but it also makes such rule more brittle. Read: When cracking down on protests backfires.
Legitimacy, not repression, is the bedrock of resilient power. Losing legitimacy is the most important threat to authorities, especially in democracies, because authorities can do only so much for so long to hold on to power under such conditions.
Maybe they can stay in power longer in part through obstacles such as voter repression, gerrymandering, and increasing the power of unelected institutions, but the society they oversee will inevitably decline, and so will their grasp on power. In that light, focusing on legitimacy as the most robust source of power, it becomes clear that the Black Lives Matter movement has been quite successful in its short life. It should first be noted: This is a young movement, but it did not start this year.
The current wave of high-risk protests is a crest in a movement that goes back to the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida, and that spread nationwide after the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the killing of Michael Brown. Understood in their proper historical context, Black Lives Matter protests are the second civil-rights movement in postwar America, and measured in that light, they are more and more successful in the most important metric: They are convincing people of the righteousness of their cause.
Successful protests are the ones that win that conversation and in the framing of the issue, and by all accounts and measures, Black Lives Matter protesters are succeeding. By , 40 percent of Americans had reported supporting the movement. Currently, two-thirds do , compared to a mere 31 percent who oppose it. For the first time, a majority of the country also supports removing Confederate statues from public places , a 19 percent shift since , when 39 percent did.
Right now, major newspapers are publishing op-eds calling for abolishing or defunding the police, while conservatives are publishing many pieces arguing that we should instead focus on reforming the police , and that abolition would go too far. Non-violent resistance also called civil disobedience is a form of protest. This type of protest is characterized by people engaging in a symbolic protest or peacefully refusing to cooperate.
An example of non-violent resistance are the sit-ins that began in as part of the Civil Rights Movement. The sit-ins spread to other college towns in the South.
Many of the protesters were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace. In the U. The government may limit the time, place and manner, but the restrictions must be reasonable and fair.
The government cannot forbid you and others from assembling to discuss or protest issues. However, since the First Amendment also stipulates that protests be peaceful, violent protesting is a violation of the law. Sometimes looting i. These actions may be taken by protesters or non-protesters i. Even though these activities are rare, they can be magnified by the media and others to garner attention and become a distraction from the focus of the protests. Throughout history, there have been times when law enforcement engaged in crackdowns on peaceful protests.
According to the ACLU , "In some cases, police crack down on demonstrations through mass arrests, illegal use of force, or curfews. The United States has a long history of protest and activism.
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