Revealing Issue Salience via Costly Protest: How Legislative Behavior Following Protest Advantages Low-Resource Groups

Abstract

Collective action, particularly by low-resource groups, presents an opportunity for re-election-minded legislators to learn about (and subsequently represent) their constituents’ salient interests. In fact, legislators are more likely to support the preferences of protesters than non-protesters. Legislators are also more likely to support the preferences of racial and ethnic minority, low-income and grassroots protesting groups than they are to represent better-resourced protesters. This argument emerges from a formal theory and is empirically tested using legislative roll-call vote data from the 102nd through the 104th US Congresses and data on civil rights, minority issues and civil liberties issue area protests reported in the New York Times. This counterintuitive result enhances understanding of inequalities in representation. It demonstrates that under certain conditions, political representation favors disadvantaged populations.

Effective for Whom? Ethnic Identity and Nonviolent Resistance

“…For one thing, public opinion is not the only channel through which movements can achieve substantial gains. In the US context, scholars such as Gause (2020) and Gillion (2013) have shown that minority mobilization can shape elite politics directly. But even when focusing on public opinion, there may be additional factors that intervene to affect public perceptions of ethnic minority protests.…”

The Persistence of Racial Cues and Appeals in American Elections

“…Many of these protests have been noteworthy not only for their size but also for the protestors' racial diversity. Future research might address whether this current political moment, which is increasingly characterized by renewed attention to race in the nation's consciousness, will be associated with meaningful policy change (Gause 2020, Gillion 2020 or if these protests will be associated with backlash (Wasow 2020).…”

Are Actions Costlier Than Words? Formal Models of Protester-Police Dynamic Interactions and Evidence from Empirical Analysis

“…The results of this study reveal that the presence of weak state authority and strong coercive capacity (number of police per 100,000 people) increase the possibility of protest management through violence. Gause [22] develops a signaling game to examine the response of legislators to low-and high-resource protester groups. The author proposes two arguments.…”

“…First is to design scenarios with the conditions illustrating the Law of Coercive Responsiveness [14] to better understand police-protester interactive dynamics. Second is to improve on the existing similar models which have elucidated some variations of interaction between the government and protester groups [22,26,36]. To illustrate the police-protester dynamic interfaces in autocratic and democratic societies which can escalate to more violent actions, we model two signaling games with two broadly conceived types of players: the police denoted as P and protesters that hereon we will be denoted as D for dissenters.…”

“…Others rely on empirical data to focus on the role of nonviolent actions in toppling regimes and enforcing policy changes [47,48]. Yet, others combine the strengths from both of these methods to deliver a better understanding about the roles of poor and middle classes in antiregime activities [22,29,39,41]. However, little attention has been devoted to the variations of protesters' tactics at the onset of nonviolent activities.…”