James Özden and Sam Glover at Social Change Lab wrote a literature review on protest outcomes[1] as part of a broader investigation[2] on protest effectiveness. The report covers multiple lines of evidence and addresses many relevant questions, but does not say much about the methodological quality of the research. So that's what I'm going to do today.

I reviewed the evidence on protest outcomes, focusing only on the highest-quality research, to answer two questions:

Do protests work?
Are Social Change Lab's conclusions consistent with the highest-quality evidence?

Here's what I found:

Do protests work? Highly likely (credence: 90%) in certain contexts, although it's unclear how well the results generalize. [More]

Are Social Change Lab's conclusions consistent with the highest-quality evidence? Yes—the report's core claims are well-supported, although it overstates the strength of some of the evidence. [More]