Exploring the Mechanisms by Which Protesters Influence Social Change and Shape Public Policy in a Country: Future Studies and Recommendations

1. Introduction

Social movements, often catalyzed by protests, have played a critical role in addressing systemic issues, inequities, and social justice in countries worldwide. Recent global uprisings addressing societal grievances, appearing as both peaceful demonstrations and riots, have echoed across many states, leading to increased scrutiny of governments' actions. The acts of protestors, who gather in public spaces and engage in collective actions, influence public debate and present multiple instances of anarchic behavior that either disrupt or sustain the ongoing order (Tilly, 2004). Protesters are not only initiators of social movements; they also act as intermediaries between quotidian grievances and their social and institutional transformations (Amenta, 2005). Some acts of protest, like mass demonstrations and riots, may influence institutions while remaining outside them (Tilly, 2004). Other acts are oriented towards addressing institutions and are thus located in the venue of delegation and deliberation of policy choices (Tilly, 2004). By combining these efforts, society can better address significant societal issues and either avoid protests entirely or react favorably to them if they escalate.

Understanding the legitimacy and mechanisms of protest acts is necessary to enable the institutionalization of agreements between politicians and protestors. Consequently, this creates an environment where public policies more adequately address the needs of the population as a whole, thereby preventing protests or similar upheavals from repeating, at least for the same grievances. This academic endeavor adopts a comprehensive perspective to shed light on the ways in which protesters influence public policy and social change in a country. By focusing on factors like the characterization of grievance expression and the possibility of social adjustment, the combined influence of both factors is analyzed through the lenses of diverse protests in different countries across the world.

Using time-series data from event-reports databases, protests and social movement organizations worldwide are classified according to the type of issue, and their mechanisms of influence are described using natural language processing techniques (Ultsch, 2005). The ways such protests influence public discourse and policymakers are analyzed across three aggregated strategies (Schneijderberg, 2010). This study is intended as a methodological approach to analyze in detail the combination of grievance expression, the type of issue being protested, and national context to observe the policy brief and societal change implications, using the data published on Protests.com. The analysis of the interaction between protest events and political actions and their potential translation to societal change can be achieved at the national level (Rocca et al., 2012). In this case, the Protests.com database (1860 to October 2018) is used to study the combined influence of the characterization of grievance expression and the national context in which both occurred.

2. Historical Perspectives on Protest Movements

In 1776 America, a group of rebels dressed as Mohawk Indians dumped tons of tea into the Boston Harbor to protest taxation without representation. Earlier, well-to-do colonists tried polite means–yelling at the King’s officers or writing pamphlets. But nothing worked. Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty had a bold new plan. They staged a clandestine meeting in the Old South Meeting House. Thousands gathered outside in the snow. They talked, and boiled, and argued until their blood was up. Then they went to the water, hurled the tea overboard, and set off the American Revolution. In 1848 Paris, the middle-class sons of the bourgeois staged a different revolutionary protest. They had been granted the right to vote, but when the King was miraculously elected to head the legislature, he summoned men of wealth to his side and sent riotous troops to harass the citizens. Barricades sprang up in the streets. Protesters poured in from the provinces. On March 24, the King fled Paris disguised as a priest. The next day the barricades fell. The revolution triumphed. In an extraordinary April 25 speech to their Committee of Thirty, the new regime’s leaders declared Paris had set off Europe’s second great revolution. The February protests against King Louis-Philippe would inspire uprisings in Berlin and Vienna, Madrid and Rome. But Lyon and four other cities had already taken action: their councils had declared their allegiance to the Parisian Republic. “That was how, on March 9, in five days! Paris freedom spilled over half of France….” (Motadel2021)(Boime, 2022)

A century later, in June 1940 Paris fell again, this time to the Nazis. Humbert had been arrested. Aged forty, his wan looks masked Blake-like power and vitality. A Frenchman delighted in pointing out his youthful mad daubs and eminent predecessors: Turner! Delacroix! While the world watched breathless, awed by the boy’s ferocity, France nurtured a swaddled potential artistic titan. Then, with a scream, three years later, Humbert threw himself out of the window of a Paris hotel as Paris fell in a crushing cesspool of collaboration and betrayal. Blast! New York’s darkness, its foreign intrigues, its whoring and backstabbing, the pits of oblivion that swallowed its forgotten. Bathed only in blood and tears, the ruined painter fled the New World nightmare. He swam across the Atlantic, arriving in 1944 at a beachhead in the French provinces. There unlike the rabble in the capital, his kind greeted him as sovereign. (Yunis)

3. Theoretical Frameworks for Understanding Protest Influence

Protests have shaped social change and policy in many countries, but how this influence happens is understudied. Theories of social movements shed light on this important domestically and internationally. Each protest has a unique social, economic, and environmental architecture that influences the impact and persistence of demonstrations. The Arab Spring is a notable example. Effective protests use engineering strategies based on the targeted audience. Do protests work? Are they always effective? Some may regard protests as elite-driven distractions. Research also draws on institutional theory, examining how protests affect political institutions themselves. In particular, the "information theory" examines how protests act as catalysts or triggers of broader institutional changes. However, understanding the mechanisms behind these changes is still an open question. Among the early systematic attempts to bridge this gap, some studies consider protests as processes generating new knowledge about voicing dissatisfaction within the existing power structure. Relevant cycles of protests are mostly urban riots or labor movement strikes. Other studies explore how civil protests change the conceptualization of legitimacy among elites and social classes in a wider social context. (Della Porta, 2020)(McMichael & Weber, 2020)

The interaction-based approach, going beyond the conceptual underpinnings of the actors involved, investigates a variety of less idealized changes that protests may cause. The impact mechanism may work through unintended consequences like costs being imposed on groups other than the protested ones, the promotion of demands that are overly radical or unattainable, or the rejection of politically unsophisticated activists as worthy interlocutors. These arguments underscore the significance of dynamic feedback mechanisms involving interactive processes between actors or groups, interacting responses to them, and the role played by their timing in generating changes in societal situations. (Ortagus et al.2020)

Current understanding of the mechanisms of how protests work in shaping social change and public policy under different dimensions of social architecture is vastly underdeveloped. Given their dynamics, protests may yield a myriad of unintended consequences unanticipated by their initiators, and thus affect social change and public policy as well as elite strategy-making discernible by no prior conceptions. Having reviewed the major conceptions underlying the study of protests, causation mechanisms generating direct or broader influential impact on policy decisions or the power structure, and the socio-structural context in which this impact may unfold, current state-of-the-art research on experiments combining these three facets recommends applying new historical data and advanced computational methods for bridging the gap at the emergence of certain types of protests. (McMichael & Weber, 2020)

4. Case Studies of Successful Protest Movements

This section examines successful protest movements from different parts of the world to highlight their potential to enact social change, shape public discourse, and influence government policy. The case studies discussed below are some of the most notable recent examples of mass protests that overcame and outlasted repression. First is the initial 2011 protests in Tunisia that ousted longtime dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali amidst the Arab Spring. Next is Turkey’s Gezi Park protests in 2013, where citizens experienced a brief taste of rapidly changing public discourse and government policy. Last is the massive Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, which generated worldwide conversations about racism and police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police. (Earl et al., 2022)

Tunisia: The Arab Spring On December 17, 2010, a young street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi committed a desperate act of protest against police harassment by setting himself alight. His act of self-immolation set off a chain reaction. Mass protests swelled against Tunisia’s dictatorship as mourners became protesters and activists called for more and larger demonstrations. Within weeks, protests had spread to cities across Tunisia. In January 2011 after weeks of protests, calls for regime change, and sporadic violence, Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled the country, marking a stunning victory for a once-fractured opposition and a breath of hope to Arabs living under repressive regimes. Tunisia was said to have started the “Arab Spring,” with protests soon circulating in Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain, and beyond. What began as protests against police harassment and unemployment morphed into a broader demand for civil liberties, human rights, the dismantling of a corrupt police state, and regime change. Tunisia inspired crowds in Cairo’s Tahrir Square protesting their autocratic president Hosni Mubarak. On February 11, 2011, after 18 days of peaceful protests, Mubarak fell, resembling Ben Ali’s quick exit from Tunisia just weeks prior. (Ewards, 2021)(Brownlee et al.)

Turkey: The Gezi Park Protests In late May 2013, peaceful sit-ins in Istanbul’s Gezi Park protesting plans to demolish the park were violently met by Turkish police. Tear gas, water cannons, and violent beatings shocked the public and led to outrage that galvanized national protests in Istanbul and spread to cities across Turkey. Police repression fueled outrage over broader issues such as government repression, corruption, abuse of power, and lack of democracy, freedom, transparency, and urban and environmental planning. Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan initially dismissed protesters as marginal, radical, vandal, and non-representative, fueling a spiraling cycle of violence. Protesters used social media, Youtube, and cellphone photos to record and document police brutality. A previously obscure hashtag #occupygezi became a worldwide trending topic conveying the protests to an international audience. Simultaneous to police violence and Erdoğan’s escalating war rhetoric against the protests, thousands of citizens took to the streets to join in solidarity with activist voices repressed by the mainstream media. A wave of spontaneous protests calling for press freedom erupted in cities such as Izmir, Ankara, and Antalya. Bans to protest on Taksim Square turned into a symbolic contest of public spaces as millions rallied in support of Gezi Park. In mid-June, civil disobedience, strikes, and sit-ins were organized on various professional, labor, student, and political fronts ahead of the upcoming G20 Summit hosted by Turkey. In the face of mass protests and strikes with many injured, dead, and imprisoned, Erdoğan’s government climbed to the unprecedented step of breaking rules of engagement, characterizing the protesters as terrorists, and conducting mass detainment operations across Turkey. Domestically, the government’s response gave hope to the opposition and opportunities to become unified while becoming increasingly isolated. Internationally, world leaders refrained from condemning Turkey’s crackdown as Erdogan favored “the one percent” paradigm and international civil society was characterized by conspiracy theories. (Lewis, 2021)

United States: The Black Lives Matter Protests In the evening of May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by police at the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota. While waiting for the ‘medical emergency’ a police SUV sat on his neck for over eight minutes, grinding his face against the pavement. A fellow officer knelt on his back and two others prevented witnesses from intervening. By mid-April, protests erupted across the country and around the world in solidarity against police violence and racism in the wake of Floyd's death. Crowds flooded Minneapolis demanding justice for Black lives—Long Live the Fire, Burn Everything Down, No Justice No Peace. George Floyd’s murder greatly shocked citizens across the country. This time, bystander footage of Floyd gasping for air and video of his ill-fated fate circulated on social media. Tens of millions of Americans saw a fellow citizen gruesomely suffocate to death in broad daylight while being brutally restrained by police. Floyd’s death sparked outrage at the institution of American policing built on a violent history of slavery and colonial violence. Floyd’s death was coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic, which had racially disproportionate impacts that further fueled the movements. Importantly, disruption and unrest in the streets were not just linked to aftereffects of the recession and decline. Ten million people lost their jobs in March and April of 2020, disrupting racial economic inequality. In poor and marginalized neighborhoods, there were longer delays in stimulus checks, people struggling to pay rent, and fears of homelessness. In note of the long history of resistance, the past months saw an unprecedented wave of protests. The Movement for Black Lives and other groups, most notably Revolutionary and Anti-Imperialist Organizations, were already mobilizing over 700 protests ahead of the vigil for George Floyd. (Libal & Kashwan, 2023)(Liu et al.2022)

5. Factors Affecting Protest Success

One of the most effective mechanisms through which members of the public can influence social change and shape public policy in their country is through protests. Protests can take various forms, such as marches, rallies, demonstrations, vigils, boycotts, or sit-ins, and they can have different purposes, such as to express grievances, to demand action, to mobilize support, or to contest injustice. However, not all protests are equally successful in achieving their goals. The outcome of protests can hinge on many factors, such as the attributes of the protesters, the contentious issue, and the broader context in which protests occur, including the political opportunity structure.

The attributes of the protesters can significantly impact the success of a protest. Factors such as education, income, and occupation can mediate the attitude toward social change and subsequent political behavior. Demographic characteristics, such as age, ethnicity, religion, and gender, and social network characteristics may also correlate with protest support. In addition, collective identity may become salient and mobilize individuals toward action. (Feinberg et al.2020)(Metcalfe & Pickett, 2022)

Broadly characterized as economic, social, and political grievances, contentious issues can also impact the success of protests. The structure of grievances surrounding a contentious issue determines how protesters frame their claims and with whom they interact. The contentiousness of the issue can also determine the nature of the actors that challenge the government. For instance, angry, violent challengers call for social disruption linked to serious issues of starvation and unemployment.

Broad sets of external and structural factors determine the broader national and regional context within which protests occur. Protests are more likely to mobilize when sudden changes in the environment lead to widespread grievances and create a perception of opportunities for collective action. These environmental changes can include the demise of old regimes, changes in regulatory regimes related to the economy and the environment, technological revolutions, or sudden shocks, like natural disasters. Political opportunity structures (POS) can broadly be understood as a set of external factors influencing the ability of actors to mobilize collective action and achieve their contentious goals. POS abroad can be characterized as being favorable or unfavorable to contentious collective action.

6. Impacts of Protest Movements on Public Policy

The 2020 pandemic-related protests have stirred a compelling academic interest in protest movements in general. The effectiveness of contentious collective action, including health-related protests, remains contested, however. Escalating protests may provoke or stymie public responsiveness to policy demands, thereby influencing policy change. This research seeks to explore, in the newly emerging milieu, dissimilar public policy consequences of increasing protest movements. To analyze the impacts of health-related protest movements in a comparative context, health committees’ policy initiatives and subsequent political decisions to alleviate their grievances in urban Brazil over a decade are examined, drawing on distinct datasets. (Ives & Lewis, 2020)(Díaz Pabón, 2023)

The results reveal two mechanisms through which the increasing number of protests necessitated responsiveness to health agendas. Perturbing the municipal system of health committees in cities with few protests enabled a more rapid response to contention there. In cities with protests in both educational and environmental policy domains, the latter’s contentiousness dissipated health-related demands. These findings bring forth new insights into contentious politics, including why the well-established cases of health-related protests against anti-neoliberal restructurings in Brazil were rare, yet health agendas prevailed policy decisions exacerbating austerity. More generally, this research sheds light on why a spiraling volume of protest movements fosters government responsiveness in dissimilar policy domains across cases, not always benefitting the initial agendas. (Musolino et al.2020)

While increased global prominence of protest politics has been noted, financial globalization, monetary crises, labor mobility, media and communication convergence, rulings of supra-national legal regimes, etc., have incited academic interest on how certain policy choices pervade societies. Mobilizations from international agencies have become more prolific in less-developed countries, otherwise poor in business viability. Such emergence of a "global" civil society is reflected in the growth of cross-border networks among NGOS, quasigovernmental organizations, and transnational coalitions. As global commons, such as poverty/environment issues, do not respect national borders, framing these in a "contextually" global manner has called for research on more heterogeneous mobilization, organization, and practices. In espousing such lines, the trans-local socio-political nexus in which the protest movements is embedded is examined with respect to consequences for public policy, to explore the mechanisms through which they influence political decisions. (Earl et al., 2022)

7. Future Research Directions

Though the present review of the literature advances our understanding of how protesters can shape policies and induce broader social change in a nation, it has taken only the first step in a long journey of inquiry that may span decades. There are many unanswered questions that future researchers can take on in a dual role of scholar and detective, selecting from several different areas of future research.

First, there is a need for more research on protests beyond the usual suspects of the United States and Western Europe. Understanding protests in other parts of the world where the historical and socio-political context regarding protest is enormously varied from that of Western Europe and the United States is crucial. There are also more general questions that the literature hasn’t yet answered that researchers might explore. For instance, how do different kinds of protests exert different forms or levels of influence on policies? In what contexts do certain kinds of protests have more or less power? Can the effects of protests be simulated in social network modeling? Besides academic research, practitioners might take on some of the future research directions as well. (Lydon, 2021)

In closing, any exploration of the social processes and accountabilities that can lead to change for the better in society and how this relates to any kind of protest or collective action, even peaceful and communitarian, is bound to be a struggle against social and institutional forces. Even protests with highly altruistic and noble intents, such as the social movements for women’s rights and equality, the abolition of the slave trade, or the movement for conservation of nature, have, as a social cost, fueled discontent, anger, and social malaise worldwide. However, consideration of the current state of affordability of protest, the extent of social blessing or acceptance of protest in a growing number of contexts, and the incumbents’ growing willingness to embrace protest as a means for social reform can change this, in turn rendering the condition of protest much more favorable for societal change. Hence, for all these future challenges and possible unforeseen hopes for the better, taking on research on protest is a worthy, if daunting, cause.

8. Recommendations for Activists and Policymakers

Emerging analyses focus on varied strategies and approaches employed by social movements to influence policy change. Within such activism, citizen protest is viewed as a powerful strategy that can draw attention to controversial policies or conditions, mobilize supporters, and prompt public outcry, which in turn may spur policy discussion and change. This viewpoint is analyzed via an aggregate examination of the broad, cross-country impacts of protests on changes to social policy and across various countries.

Governments may use indirect avenues to reduce the risks of losing electoral games in the wake of protests. While protesters ordinarily hope to win policy concessions from the authorities, representatives of the latter, in turn, must ensure survival in the face of potential election loss. When policies and preferences differ, a gap is created, and it is the task of the authorities to close such a gap rapidly. Rapid closure of the gap resulting from the protest is likely to require the adoption of policies in favor of the median voter. Therefore, high electoral stakes and a significant gap between protester and policymaker preferences should induce the latter to take policy action.

On the side of the protesters, an inherent trade-off exists concerning strategies of mobilization. On one hand, mass gatherings offer greater potential – both for framing issues more favorably to induce action and for creating opportunities for distributed collective action. On the other hand, more disruptive strategies, such as blocking streets, may backfire if perceived as costly as well as intimidating. Moreover, mass mobilization both increases visibility and enables more diverse, broad-based, coalition-type frames. Thus, while their impacts are multi-dimensional, the direction of a net impact is hypothesized by utilizing the frameworks of the minimal group paradigm and relative deprivation.

Recent studies have yielded varied results concerning the relationship between mass protests and their impact on issues such as climate change and education policies. Previous studies on the topic also consider only the United States, while growing attention is being paid to analyzing political phenomena in a comparative perspective. In addition, protest dynamics and impacts could be quite different in various national or geographical contexts. Though not discussing the direct or indirect impacts per se, 18 growing opportunities and threats faced by the protests are analyzed, considering both exerted mechanisms/pressure and the global adoption of the protests as a frame or pattern by which to legitimize participants’ demands across various political arenas. This arises amid concern over established elites’ discreditation and the ensuing fragmentation of the public sphere. Nevertheless, as protests may put political decisions on hold and bureaucratic processes on freeze, in addition to the outcomes mentioned, they may also prevent a shift in policy. On the other hand, it is important to realize that public protests would ordinarily be minor, and that the shape of impact on broader change may depart from the ideal type. 20 Finally, it is necessary to emphasize that the dimensions of engagement and of policy change must be specified further.

9. Conclusion

Protesters can use persuasion to affect social change and influence public policies in several different ways. They can persuade politicians to enact policies that need to be considered, supporting their position with facts and logic and countering the anticipated counter-arguments. Politicians always seek to please constituents and avoid extreme measures from influential groups. They can be persuaded to support reform proposals if they are also dispositionally indifferent, unconvinced, or unsure about the problem and solution. Protesters can also mount campaigns designed to persuade public interest groups and constituents, making it more difficult for politicians to remain undecided.

The role of emotions in protesting should not be neglected, either. Protests can signal a new configuration of emotions – a new fear, anger, or hope that has emerged, a new belief in what is possible and what makes sense. With this new configuration of emotions, people may respond unexpectedly, heedless of calculations. If enough people are swayed, they can link up with others and raise chain reactions across the country and the world. Researchers should investigate emotions as potentially strategic mechanisms of influence over public policies.

These mechanisms are not mutually exclusive. Protesters with sufficient resources to establish rival media can take advantage of under-reported protests. Different mechanisms may be at play at different times or in different countries, forming a complex ensemble. The idea of chance may not be entirely absent from this ensemble. Reasoned deliberation, consensus, and emotion are components of a complex system that can show unpredictable emergent phenomena. Researchers might want to assess the potential of protests by anticipating the public and political reaction it might trigger and linking all of these answers together: Do the mechanisms of influence add up? Are there tipping points after which an inverse publicity effect could occur? (Brochmann, 2020)

It is important that all protests take place at least with minimal awareness of the mechanisms by which it might trigger influence attempts in deliberative political systems. There are recommendations designed to protect less powerful interests from deliberative forms of political influence of subjectively unreasonable complaints. They need to worry about similar influence attempts. Protests in contexts of electronic or algorithmically mediated deliberation need to be concerned that such emergent aggregation mechanisms might not favor democratic deliberation after all. Emphasis on emotions may reinforce and give salience to pre-existing biases rather than counteracting them.

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