For Whom Does Democracy Work? The Influence of the Black Lives Matter Movement

• In Event: Democracy and Social Movements

Abstract

Democratic theorists have argued that civic engagement accounts for the quality of democracy (Putnam 1993). In times of growing discontent towards electoral democracy, social agency and associational life may hold the key to the revitalization of American democracy (Skocpol, Ganz, and Munson 2000). Academics, politicians, and journalists have deemed protests and protesters to be as American as apple pie (Andrews 1994). Yet, not all social groups get a piece of this pie. Minority political efforts to challenge the status quo have shown that not all social groups can bring claims to the political system with the same ease and raised questions about the legitimacy of American political institutions (Thompson and Thurston 2018). Black protests, for example, have been more likely to be repressed than white protests (Davenport, Soule, and Armstrong 2011). Black activists in the US and abroad have been subject to surveillance and police raids, branded as terrorists and criminals, and deemed to be deserving of violence (Davis 2016; Davis 2018; Khan-Cullors and bandele 2018; Taylor 2018). Despite facing barriers to political participation and being perceived as threats (Davenport, Soule, and Armstrong 2011), minority groups have persisted and continued to challenge the American political system to be more representative of their identities and responsive to their claims. One of the most prominent of these systemic challenges has been the Black Lives Matter movement. This study assesses the event to which the Black Lives Matter movement exerted political influence in the wake of the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

The death of unarmed African Americans at the hands of police ignited a wave of contentious political action and solidarity demonstrations across the United States and the globe. Activists and allies decried state-sponsored violence and called for comprehensive reforms to address structural racism. Despite the outpouring of solidarity and the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement, activists and scholars affirm that efforts to achieve policy change were blocked by conservative backlash and coordinated attempts to prevent legislation that addressed movement claims. This study draws from the author’s participant observation of the Black Lives Matter movement as well as from an expanded and updated dataset of Black Lives Matter activism, originally developed by Williamson et al (2018), to examine the extent to which the movement exerted state and local policy change. This dataset includes observations of Black Lives Matter activism between 2014-2018 in 1,358 localities in the US with a population over 30,000. This includes protests, the presence of movement organizations, among various measures of the political context in which the movement operates.

The study finds that Black Lives Matter protests led to the adoption of an amalgam of policies aimed at addressing violence against Black communities. These policies included creating or reforming existing police oversight boards, legislation on body cameras, allocating resources for better data gathering on unarmed civilian deaths at the hands of police, criminal justice reforms, among other policy instruments. Cities were more likely to adopt policies when protesters persisted and demonstrated repeatedly. These finding have implications for theories of democracy, social movements and policy change and, specifically, scholarship on questions of identity in movements, movement survival, and the political consequences of social movements.

Author

• Fernando Arturo Tormos Aponte, University of Maryland Baltimore County