Black Networks Matter

• In Event: Black Lives, Black Deaths, and Black Protest: Political Scientists Respond (Anew) to a Persistent Challenge: Black Lives Matter and Political Behavior: Public Opinion and Political Participation

Abstract

This summer’s historic tide of black-led protests made history not only for their political impact but for their ability to mobilize millions of people outside of a formal organizational framework. What explains this success? Although this stunning turnout may be partially attributable to impersonal forms of media such as YouTube videos and social media influencers with millions of followers, prior research suggests that peer recruitment among friends, family, and acquaintances is likely to have had a substantial impact. In this paper, we explore the extent to which black protesters have harnessed the power of their own personal networks, circumventing slower-moving hierarchical organizations, to build a true grassroots movement.

Reliable quantitative data on protester attributes is hard to come by. Gathering a representative sample of attendees at a live protest is formidable and obtaining a sufficiently large sample of protesters can prove even more difficult once participants have returned home. A typical population survey of approximately 1000 respondents is unlikely to pick up a sufficient number of protesters, let alone black protesters, to analyze their motivations and beliefs. The collection of social media posts such as geotagged tweets has allowed scholars to make considerable headway, but protester motivation and race remain hard to capture on a large scale, even with automated text analysis. We, therefore, turn to a novel instrument of unparalleled scope: a 25,000-respondent multi-wave panel survey including thousands of protesters and a targeted oversample of black adults. This survey is currently in the field and we expect data collection and preliminary analysis to be complete prior to APSA.

Our data allow us to address a wide array of questions about how black protesters use peer recruitment to drive turnout. How important are personal messages and conversations in people’s decisions to attend compared to simply being exposed to posts on social media? Are acquaintances as capable of recruiting as close friends? To what extent is recruitment driven by event organizers or existing formal organizations versus unaffiliated friends and family? Within the black community, are there major class or age differences between protesters and non-protesters? Who is most likely to try to recruit other protests and, of those, what traits predict success? The role of non-black allies has drawn considerable attention in the media, yet the role of black activists in driving non-black turnout remains underexplored. One mechanism we investigate is explicit recruitment by a black friend or acquaintance. However, we also examine whether respondents know someone who has been harmed by police racism/violence, and we look at the ways in which recruitment among black people differs from the ways in which black protesters recruit non-black participants. We also look at how recruitment of first-time protesters, political conservatives and moderates, and older participants may operate through different channels. For instance, are people who do not self-identify as activists more likely to be persuasive in getting these individuals to turn out?

All told, our data offer an unprecedented glimpse into the demographics and dynamics of black protest. Our results and conclusions have the potential to improve our understanding not only of protest dynamics generally but of the ways in which black protesters use their social capital to compensate for other forms of capital that society has denied them. We aim to show how black networks matter not only to the present political moment but to influencing future movement mobilization in the U.S. and around the world.

Authors

• Matthew D. Simonson, University of Pennsylvania

• Katherine Ognyanova, Rutgers University

• Matthew A. Baum, Harvard University

• James N. Druckman, Northwestern University

• David Lazer, Northeastern University