protest

Studying how protest affects society

Previous research on protest frequently focuses on societal impacts—how protests influence elites and policymaking—but much less is known about how protests affect bystanders in exposed communities. To better understand this, our research design focuses exactly on these bystanders: how they perceive protest and how direct exposure in local communities matters.

How we addressed it

  • Field experiment: Conducted a large‑scale randomized field experiment assigning citizens to observe local demonstrations and measuring changes in their perceptions, social‑norm beliefs, and behavioral intentions.
  • Fine-grained local data analysis: Compiled street‑level data on PEGIDA rallies (2014–2018) and applied difference‑in‑differences and matching methods to estimate impacts on local electoral outcomes and immigration attitudes.
  • Historical panel study, fuzzy RDD: Collected geocoded data on Nazi‑era street brawls and applied panel analyses to assess the long‑term effects of extremist violence on local political behavior.
  • Vignette survey experiment: Experiment comparing reactions to identical protest tactics by farmers versus climate activists to uncover democratic hypocrisy.

Key Findings

  1. Bystander behavior: Witnessing protests increases bystanders’ alignment with protest demands in their actions, even though their underlying attitudes remain largely unchanged.
  2. Electoral spillover: Exposure to PEGIDA rallies leads to significant increases in radical‑right vote shares and support for stricter migration controls among mainstream right‑leaning voters, while left‑leaning voters exhibit a backlash.
  3. Heterogeneous responses: Effects vary across social identities and prior political orientations, highlighting that protest exposure can both mobilize sympathizers and provoke counter‑mobilization among opponents.
  4. Selective tolerance: Citizens are significantly more willing to endorse undemocratic responses (e.g., imprisonment without trial) and restrict key rights when protests involve climate activists versus farmers.
  5. Normalization of intolerance: Democratic hypocrisy extends to support for anti‐democratic rhetoric from fellow citizens, indicating a risk of normalizing intolerance through selective tolerance biases.

Implications

For protest organizers: Organizers should design protests to maximize constructive bystander engagement—using clear signage, respectful framing, and follow‑up materials—to turn passive observers into supporters while minimizing backlash. Embedding dialogue stations or distributing informative pamphlets can help sustain the mobilizing effects beyond the event itself.

For political elites: Elected officials must recognize that local protests can reshape vote shares and issue salience. Proactive outreach—such as town halls in protest‑exposed neighborhoods and public acknowledgments of grievances—can channel protest energy into institutional debates rather than polarized backlash.

For social science: Combining field experiments with fine-grained protest data uncovers the nuanced ways in which protest exposure shapes bystander behavior and local politics. Future work should examine the psychological and media‑mediated mechanisms underlying these heterogeneous effects.

Publications

Working Papers