David Yang, a Harvard researcher and author on protests, joins Noam Yuchtman from the University of Oxford to unravel the dynamics of modern protest movements. They discuss how social media shapes activism and the changing nature of protests post-Arab Spring. The conversation explores economic motivations behind protests, emphasizing how poverty and unemployment fuel discontent. They also highlight the pro-social motivations of individuals involved, reframing the narrative around protesters as committed to public welfare rather than just discontent.
Protests serve as essential expressions of dissent for marginalized individuals, highlighting their unmet needs within political frameworks and governance.
The intricacies of measuring protest effectiveness reveal that success can often be inferred from participation scale rather than immediate policy outcomes.
Deep dives
The Importance of Protests
Protests serve as a critical outlet for individuals feeling disenfranchised or unrepresented within political systems. While voting provides a formal mechanism for expressing political preferences, it often fails to capture the sentiments of minority groups or those lacking confidence in governance. The act of protesting becomes a meaningful means of communication and mobilization, conveying grievances that may go unheard through traditional political channels. This need for expression underscores the global prevalence of disempowerment and grievance, prompting individuals to take to the streets as a form of advocacy.
Defining and Collecting Protest Data
Protests can be defined as collective actions that demand specific political changes and can vary in size and structure. However, measuring these activities empirically poses challenges, as not every protest is documented by media or available data sources. The GDELT project is one example of an attempt to organize and categorize information related to global events, including protests, using machine learning. While diverse datasets exist, each comes with limitations, highlighting the need for careful data collection and analysis to understand protest dynamics.
Linking Protests to Success and Outcomes
Understanding the success of protests is complicated due to the continuous nature of political movements and the context in which protests occur. Individual protests often serve as ongoing expressions within broader movements, making it difficult to directly link them to immediate policy changes. Factors such as the time lag following protests and the lack of specific objectives complicate the assessment of their success. Scholars have found a more observable definition of success can be gauged by whether protests actually take place and their scale, which can reveal critical insights about mobilization dynamics.
The Role of Economic Factors in Protests
While economic grievances can trigger protests, they do not inherently guarantee protest activity at the country level. Historical instances, such as the Occupy movement, indicate that economic dissatisfaction can mobilize people, but the prevalence of protests often requires additional organizing forces and conditions. The presence of pro-social individuals within movements suggests that motivations for protesting go beyond economic conditions and also encompass a desire for systemic change. This nuanced understanding reveals the multi-faceted factors that contribute to successful protest organization and participation.
When citizens demand change and feel they are not being heard, they protest on the
streets. Thanks to social media and TV coverage, we see protests every night on the
news. But has the frequency or the character of protests changed? Who is
protesting, and what makes them take to the streets? David Yang and Noam
Yuchtman are two of the authors of a new review of the literature on protests. They
tell Tim Phillips what they discovered.