EA - Protest movements: How effective are they? by James Ozden

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Protest movements: How effective are they?, published by James Ozden on August 22, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Social Change Lab is an EA-aligned non-profit that conducts and disseminates social movement research. For the past six months, we’ve been researching the outcomes of protests and protest movements using a variety of methods, including literature reviews, polling (see our previous post on the EA Forum here, which goes into more detail), and interviewing experts and policymakers. Today, we’re releasing an in-depth report on the work we’ve done in the last six months that relates to protest outcomes. We’ll also be releasing another report soon on the factors that make social movements more or less likely to succeed. Specifically, we’re looking at just how much of a difference protest movements can make, and the areas in which they seem to be particularly effective. We think this is relevant to Effective Altruists for a few reasons: firstly, protests and grassroots activities seem to be a tactic that social movements can use that has been fairly neglected by EAs. As Will MacAskill points out in What We Owe The Future, social movements such as Abolitionism have had a huge impact in the past, and we think that it’s likely that they will do so again in the future. It seems extremely valuable to look at this in more detail: how impactful are protests and grassroots pressure? What are the mechanisms by which they can make a difference? Is it mostly by influencing public opinion, the behaviour of legislators, corporations, or something else? Secondly, Effective Altruism is itself a social movement. Some interesting work has been done before (for instance, this post on why social movements sometimes fail by Nuño Sempere), but we think it seems valuable to think in more detail about both the impact that social movements can have, and also what makes them likely to succeed or fail (which we’ll be talking about in a report that we intend to release soon). Research on how different social movements achieved outsized impacts seems like it would be useful in helping positively influence the future impact of Effective Altruism. We hope that you enjoy reading the report, and would be hugely appreciative for any feedback that people have about what we’ve been doing so far (we’re a fairly new organisation and there are definitely things we still have to learn). The rest of this post includes the summary of the report, as well as the introduction and methodology. The full results examining protest movements outcomes on public opinion, policy change, public discourse, voting behaviour and corporative behaviour are best seen in the full report here. Executive Summary Social Change Lab has undertaken six months of research looking into the outcomes of protests and protest movements, focusing primarily on Western democracies, such as those in North America and Western Europe. In this report, we synthesise our research, which we conducted using various research methods. These methods include literature reviews, public opinion polling, expert interviews, policymaker interviews and a cost-effectiveness analysis. This report only examines the impacts and outcomes of protest movements. Specifically, we mostly focus on the outcomes of large protest movements with at least 1,000 participants in active involvement. This is because we want to understand the impact that protests can have, rather than the impact that most protests will have. Due to this, our research looks at unusually influential protest movements, rather than the median protest movement. We think this is a reasonable approach, as we generally believe protest movements are a hits-based strategy for doing good. In short, we think that most protest movements have little success in achieving their aims, or otherwise po...