Badge of Courage or Sign of Criminality? Experimental Evidence for How Voters Respond to Candidates Who Were Arrested at a Protest

Abstract

Objective. To test whether political activists who are arrested at a protest will subsequently be more or less able to successfully run for office. Methods. We use a conjoint survey experiment conducted on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform. Participants are asked to choose between hypothetical candidates, with a protest arrest randomly added to the description of one candidate. We also vary the group that organized the protest, the demographics of the candidate, how much time has passed since the protest, and the seriousness of the arrest charge. Results. We find left-leaning voters can see a protest arrest as an asset, if it occurred at a left-wing protest. Right-leaning voters are less tolerant of protest arrests though, especially if the candidate is black or if the protest was recent. Conclusion. We conclude that activists with electoral ambitions should weigh the risks of arrest carefully, especially if they are black or will need to appeal to right-leaning electorates. Arrests are common at U.S. protests. But although this risk is often discussed in protestor "know your rights" trainings, the long-term impacts of getting arrested at a protestwhich may vary across race and gender-are uncertain (

Individual legal action as minority activism: Romani Germans in 1950s West Germany

“…One way around this is to skirt the self‐identification issue altogether, which many scholars do by explaining what activism means in the context of their study and then applying the label “activist” to people engaged in those activities (Armendariz et al. 2020; Brown 2021; Jenkins 2017). This approach acknowledges that because the start of self‐identification as an activist can hinge on when someone else bestows the activist label, not when a person starts doing more activism, requiring all activists to be people who self‐identify as activists places more value on external validation than on a person's actions (Craddock 2019).…”