What's the Point Of Protests?

Maybe Not What We Think It Is

Students protest at an encampment supporting Palestinians on the Columbia University campus in New York City, April 25 [Caitlin Ochs/Reuters]

Catch-up service:
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This week: protests, plus thoughts on Ripley and Baby Reindeer, plus a rattle bag of goodies.

On British streets and American campuses, the air is thick with flags and chants. London has seen major pro-Palestinian demonstrations almost every weekend for months, the most prolonged series of protests for any cause in recent memory. In the US, police have been called in to disperse particularly obstructive protests at Columbia, Emory and Stanford. There’s an ongoing and vituperative debate over whether these protests have become a method of intimidation, and when the right to protest clashes with the right of others to live their lives. Here I’m interested in a different question: what’s the point of protests? What motivates people to take part in them?

The obvious answer is to influence politics and policy. Over the last couple of months, the Biden administration and Rishi Sunak’s government have both taken a marginally firmer stance against the Israeli government’s prosecution of the war. Some have suggested that this was down to the protests (see, for example, the conclusion of this report). But while it’s hard to disprove such a claim, this seems tenuous. There has definitely been a widespread shift in political and public opinion against Israel’s actions, but that was probably caused by the accumulation of terrible news from the conflict, rather than by protests. Did protests keep the war in the headlines? Maybe, but what really makes it salient are the pictures of human devastation in Gaza.

It’s easy to think of historic examples of protests which seemed to have a political impact, like anti-Vietnam protests or the poll tax riots. But these are exceptions. For all the attention they garner, protests generally don’t make any difference. A new working paper authored by a couple of economists studies 14 major protest movements in the United States between 2017 and 2022. These were protests were about topics like immigration, climate change, gun control and racism. Using data from Twitter, Google and public opinion surveys, the authors examine whether the protests affected the salience of the issues involved, and whether they changed policy views and political opinions.

What they find is that the protests generated a short-term bump in online activity but left no lasting footprint on opinions or politics. The one exception was the Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd. That event shifted views on racism and made people more likely to vote Democrat (though its wider consequences are ambiguous, as I’ll get to later). Other than that, say the authors, “we estimate precise null effects on public opinion and electoral behaviour”.

Maybe if all prospective protesters knew about this evidence, and accepted it, they wouldn’t go to protests, and instead channel their energies into other kinds of campaigning. But I doubt it. First of all, participation in protests might plausibly lead to more enduring forms of political organisation, as people get to meet and bond with other like-minded individuals. Secondly, protesters might believe they’re engaged in a strategic game of chicken, with students deliberately breaking laws in order to provoke the authorities into calling in the police, which provokes a media storm and so on, though it’s far from clear they can reliably predict the political consequences of such escalation.

Thirdly, and more fundamentally, I don’t think that effecting political change is the main reason people join protests. As evidence, I call this clip:

To be clear, my intent in showing this is not to say ‘Ha ha, look at these idiots’ (very much the spirit in which it has been shared on social media). These young women seem likeable and decent to me. I also think they’re closer to the median protester than someone who gave a detailed account of the policy issues at stake would be. They are at the protest because they want to be in a group of their peers; to show that they care; to be part of a big and exciting communal event. They’re not gathering in order to protest; they’re protesting in order to gather.

It’s a natural instinct. Compared to our closest primate relations, humans have a strong propensity to copy the behaviour of others, even when we don’t know why we’re doing so. Anthropologists call this “over-imitation”, and regard it as the basis of human culture and learning. Over-imitation seems to have two main benefits. The first is that it’s an efficient way to pick up the skills we need to survive and thrive. The second is that it’s a form of group bonding. The anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse refers to different brain states associated with each: the “instrumental stance” and the “ritual stance”. In the instrumental stance, we’re focused on getting something done with others. In the ritual stance, we’re focused on affiliation.

An interesting 2014 experiment shows how these two tendencies are hardwired in infants. The researchers showed 96 children, aged 3-6, a video with animated shapes, which told a simple story of either ostracism or affiliation. In the ostracism version, when a new shape approached the existing shapes, they moved away and excluded it. In the affiliation version, the shapes were inclusive - they continued moving together when the new shape approached.