“Do Protests Work? A Critical Review” by MichaelDickens

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:

1. Do protests work?
2. 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]

Introduction

This [...]

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Outline:

(01:16) Introduction

(04:07) Studies on real-world protest outcomes

(09:12) Madestam et al. (2013) on Tea Party protests

(12:09) Placebo tests

(13:42) Wasow (2020) on 1960s civil rights protests

(15:12) Klein Teeselink & Melios (2021) on 2020 Black Lives Matter protests

(17:42) Failed placebo tests

(19:54) Larreboure & González (2021) on the Womens March

(22:18) Hungerman & Moorthy (2023) on Earth Day

(25:13) Meta-analysis

(33:05) Potential problems with the research

(33:09) Spatial autocorrelation

(34:22) Publication bias

(38:27) Data fabrication

(40:17) Data errors

(41:25) Will the results generalize?

(42:18) Meta-concerns with this meta-analysis

(43:01) Are Social Change Labs claims justified?

(43:06) Broad claims

(48:36) Claims about individual studies

(52:02) Conclusion

(52:51) Source code

(52:59) Appendix A: Additional tables

(57:18) Appendix B: Methodological revisions

(59:38) Appendix C: Comparing the strength of evidence to saturated fat research

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First published:
April 18th, 2025

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/v6PtkcfZQAHR2Cgmx/do-protests-work-a-critical-review

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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