The Impact of Protest on Elections in the United States*

Gillion, Daniel Q.; Soule, Sarah A.

doi:10.1111/ssqu.12527

Cited by 30 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…However, Lee only investigates nonviolent protests, and therefore, neither models nor estimates differential effects of nonviolent versus violent protest. Gillion (2012Gillion ( , 2013 and Gillion and Soule (2018) show protests serve as an "informative cue" to Congress, presidents, the Supreme Court, and voters. These works offer compelling evidence that violence serves as a kind of signal amplifier but also do not model possible differential effects of violence.…”

Section: Elite and Pluralistic Theories Of Influencementioning

confidence: 99%

Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting

2020

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How do stigmatized minorities advance agendas when confronted with hostile majorities? Elite theories of influence posit marginal groups exert little power. I propose the concept of agenda seeding to describe how activists use methods like disruption to capture the attention of media and overcome political asymmetries. Further, I hypothesize protest tactics influence how news organizations frame demands. Evaluating black-led protests between 1960 and 1972, I find nonviolent activism, particularly when met with state or vigilante repression, drove media coverage, framing, congressional speech, and public opinion on civil rights. Counties proximate to nonviolent protests saw presidential Democratic vote share increase 1.6–2.5%. Protester-initiated violence, by contrast, helped move news agendas, frames, elite discourse, and public concern toward “social control.” In 1968, using rainfall as an instrument, I find violent protests likely caused a 1.5–7.9% shift among whites toward Republicans and tipped the election. Elites may dominate political communication but hold no monopoly.

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Section: Elite and Pluralistic Theories Of Influencementioning

confidence: 99%

Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting

2020

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“…According to this idea, public protest is designed to unleash a public debate, to draw the attention of the public to the grievances of the actors in question, to create controversy where there was none, and to obtain the support of the public for the actors’ concerns. Put differently, protest fulfils three essential functions that may drive the dynamic relation between protest and electoral politics: they draw attention to the public's grievances and may unleash a controversy (attention function); they attribute political responsibility for (economic) disparities (attribution function); and they can strengthen allies in the political system (spin function) (for a related discussion, see Gillion & Soule : 2ff)…”

Section: Theoretical Framework and Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamics of protest and electoral politics in the Great Recession

Bremer

Hutter

Kriesi

2020

European J Political Res

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This article links the consequences of the Great Recession on protest and electoral politics. It innovates by combining the literature on economic voting with social movement research and by presenting the first integrated, large-scale empirical analysis of protest mobilisation and electoral outcomes in Europe. The economic voting literature offers important insights on how and under what conditions economic crises play out in the short-run. However, it tends to ignore the closely connected dynamics of opposition in the two arenas and the role of protests in politicising economic grievances. More specifically, it is argued that economic protests act as a 'signalling mechanism' by attributing blame to decision makers and by highlighting the political dimension of deteriorating economic conditions. Ultimately, massive protest mobilisation should, thus, amplify the impact of economic hardship on the electoral losses of incumbents and mainstream parties more generally. The empirical analysis to study this relationship relies on an original semi-automated protest event dataset combined with an updated dataset of electoral outcomes in 30 European countries from 2000 to 2015. The results indicate that the dynamics of economic protests and electoral punishment are closely related and point to a destabilisation of European party systems during the Great Recession.

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“…Protests are a form of civic engagement and participation, which are often positively associated with democratic reforms [ 87 , 88 ] and transparency enabled by open government data, with the latter being driven by political and cultural pressures that differ across geographic areas [ 19 ]. As a form of collective action and communication, protests affect the beliefs of policymakers by supplying them with signals indicative of public opinion [ 83 , 89 ].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%