The science of contemporary street protest: New efforts in the United States

Fisher, Dana R.; Andrews, Kenneth T.; Caren, Neal; Chenoweth, Erica; Heaney, Michael T.; Leung, Tommy; Perkins, L. Nathan; Pressman, Jeremy

doi:10.1126/sciadv.aaw5461

Cited by 116 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 81 publications

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“…Consistent with other studies of activism during this period of heightened contention in the US (see e.g., Fisher, 2019a;Fisher et al, 2019), organizers during all three waves of the movement-in spring 2019, fall 2019, and spring 2020-were predominantly female (66%, 68%, and 65% respectively), majority White (67%, 77%, and 72% respectively), and came from highly educated families. During all three waves, the majority of participants reported coming from households with parents/guardians who had completed an undergraduate degree or higher.…”

Section: Overview Of the Datasetsupporting

confidence: 88%

Shifting Coalitions within the Youth Climate Movement in the US

Fisher

Nasrin

2021

PaG

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How has the youth climate movement in the US grown since the Climate Strikes began and in what ways did it change as it grew? This article takes advantage of a unique dataset that includes surveys from activists who organized the nationally coordinated climate strikes in the US that began with Fridays for Future in spring 2019. Building on the research on alliance building and strategic coalitions, this article analyzes how the patterns of participation changed over the period of the study. We employ social network analysis to map the affiliation networks among the organizers of these events to assess the coalitions of groups involved and the shifting organizational landscape. Our analysis does not provide evidence that groups spanned the boundaries across movements, nor does it show that identity plays a role in coalition building in this movement. Instead, by mapping out the coalition of organizations within this movement and how connections among them change over time, we see clear evidence that this youth-led movement was reoriented by adult-led organizations. Our article concludes by considering how these findings suggest the future trajectory of the youth climate movement and its role in a ‘new climate politics’ in America.

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Section: Overview Of the Datasetsupporting

confidence: 88%

Shifting Coalitions within the Youth Climate Movement in the US

Fisher

Nasrin

2021

PaG

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“…More importantly maybe, our study highlights how psychological researchers can study the in vivo dynamics of collective action in a way that circumvents traditional methodological limitations (Fisher et al, 2019).…”

Section: Mixed-effects Analysesmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…Incidentally, this type of data can now be retrieved from newly available databases on protest counts over time in the US (with daily updates, see Fisher et al, 2019). Therefore, the main challenge remains to find an ecological measure of social identification that could be paired with these protest counts.…”

Section: An Ecological Approach To Protestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The database also includes estimates of attendance (number of participants), which are approximate (e.g., a report of 'dozen' is counted as '10'). More details about the inner workings of Count Love can be found in Fisher et al (2019). We extracted the data on March 8 th of 2020, yielding N = 23,481 protests including 12,641,229 demonstrators.…”

Section: Protest Mobilizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘We Shall Overcome’: First-Person Plural Pronouns from Search Volume Data Predict Collective Action across the United States

Bonetto¹,

Arciszewski²

2020

Preprint

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Collective action is a key driver of social and political change within societies. So far, the main factor mobilizing individuals into collective action remains the extent to which they feel identified with a protesting group (i.e., social identification). Although the link between social identification and collective action is well-established, current evidence relies mostly on self-report data. To tackle this issue, we combined real-life protest counts in the US (2017-2020) with online search data (Google Trends) for pronouns indicating a ‘group’ mindset (first-person plural pronouns; e.g. ‘we’, ‘us’). Time series analyses indicated that weekly fluctuations in searches (N = 164) predict both protest and protester counts over time. Confirmatory mixed-models then showed that a 1% increase in pronoun searches was linked with +13.67% protests 95%CI[4.02,23.32] and +47.45% protesters 95%CI[26.54, 68.36] the following week. These original results have important implications for the ecological study and quantification of collective action dynamics in psychology.

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“…Work on this issue may be most advanced around how consumer choices have impacts not only on direct consumption of energy in the household but also impacts on the supply chain (Gilligan and Vandenbergh 2020;Stern and Dietz 2020). Social movement scholars have examined how mobilization can influence policy (Fisher et al 2019). But more work is needed to understand how social movement support by individuals influences largerscale social change to parallel needed work on how large-scale changes influence individuals.…”

Section: What Next?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Political events and public views on climate change

Dietz

2020

Climatic Change

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The gap between the scientific assessment of climate risks and the actions being taken to mitigate and adapt to climate change is stunning. Why does this gap exist, and what can be done to close it? First, it is important to remember that facts are never sufficient for making decisions (Dietz 2013). Decisions require weighing costs, benefits, and risks, distributed differentially across the globe. Making tradeoffs involves values. So value differences and value conflicts have to be resolved in order to take action. Second, policy to respond to climate inevitably involves many interested and affected parties and multiple issues. That complexity alone can slow processes even when there is consensus about facts and values. But the active denial of the scientific consensus by some members of the public and some elites is a particularly troubling obstacle to climate action (McCright and Dunlap 2010; McCright et al. 2016). Hahnel et al. (2020) and Zawadzki et al. (2020) offer important insights into climate denial. They use a major political event in the USA, the election of Republican President Donald Trump, as a natural experiment to reveal some of the dynamics of climate denial and climate action. Politics is both a top-down and a bottom-up process (McLaughlin 2012; McLaughlin and Dietz 2008). The actions of citizens influence elites and policy. But the public is in turn influenced by larger forces and powerful actors, including politicians. The Republican victory in the 2016 election gives an opportunity to see how a large-scale political change impacted public opinion, thus linking the micro level of public views with the macro level of elites and national events. Most research tends to work at one level or the other. But crossing levels of analysis is essential if we are to understand the interplay of power structures and individual views and actions. The ideological split in views on climate change has been much studied. Conservatives (Republicans in the USA) are much more likely to be deniers of the scientific consensus than liberals (Democrats) (McCright et al. 2016). That is, conservatives are less likely to believe that the climate is changing, that the causes are largely anthropogenic, that the risks are substantial, and that action needs to be taken. The ideological difference about climate has

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The science of contemporary street protest: New efforts in the United States

Abstract: We review how the science of studying street protest has changed, identifying opportunities for innovation and collaboration.

Cited by 116 publications

References 81 publications

Shifting Coalitions within the Youth Climate Movement in the US

Shifting Coalitions within the Youth Climate Movement in the US

‘We Shall Overcome’: First-Person Plural Pronouns from Search Volume Data Predict Collective Action across the United States

Political events and public views on climate change

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