Law and Disorder? A Survey Experiment on Perceptions of Protest and Nonviolence

• In Event: 3451 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 14. Violence and Non-Violence

Abstract

In recent years, numerous scholars have argued that nonviolent tactics cause people to view protests more positively and consider protests good for democracy. Yet this research typically looks at tactics in isolation from other contextual variables, including the identity and goals of the protest. We propose that perceptions about the intensity of protest tactics can be an effect of preexisting dispositions and biases rather than an independent judgment, such that the correlation between perceived tactics and protest support may be a spurious one. People’s beliefs about the tactics employed and their (presumably) related expression of support for or rejection of a protest’s goals may simply be a post hoc rationalization of a prior judgment about the identity of the protest actors and their demands. We also expect that agreement with a protest’s goals, independent of tactics, should influence views about the value of protest to democracy and support for proposed anti-protest legislation. To test the theory, we employ an original survey experiment of 950 respondents through the MTurk platform. It includes a fictional vignette that randomly assigns protester group identity and tactics. Using a structural equation model, we show that how the public perceives tactics is partly determined by extraneous factors, and that assigned tactics have little effect on policy preferences.

Authors

• Yuan Hsiao, University of Washington

• Scott Radnitz, University of Washington