JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The first hundred days of Donald Trump's second presidential term have been characterized by layoffs of federal workers, questionable deportations of protesters and his unusual relationship with Elon Musk. And through all of that, there have been protests in different parts of the country.
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UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) Hey, hey, ho, ho, Donald Trump has got to go. Hey, hey, ho, ho, Donald Trump has got to go.
SUMMERS: That sound from one of the 1,300 Hands Off rallies that took place on April 5, but are those protests changing any minds or changing any policies? Those are questions I put to Harvard Kennedy School of Government political scientist Erica Chenoweth.
What is it that makes a protest effective?
ERICA CHENOWETH: So the literature really suggests that there are four key things that help social movements, in general, succeed. So one of the things is size. So a very large protest is much more likely to get noticed, to demonstrate people power, to have a large symbolic impact and potentially to begin to shift people's understandings about the stakes of an event or a set of claims that are emerging from it. A very diverse crowd also suggests that whatever the protesters are saying is something that's widely shared. Protests that are disciplined, that is to say that they stick to their own message and their own plan tactically, are more likely to elicit sympathy or sympathetic views. And the movements that are the most effective are those that begin to shift the loyalties of people in different pillars of support.
SUMMERS: As I think about some of the biggest protests that I've seen, at least in my lifetime, they've come from the political left. I'm thinking about things like the Black Lives Matter movement, #MeToo, the war in Gaza. I wonder, has that been the case historically?
CHENOWETH: You know, a prominent paper actually looks at the impacts of the Tea Party protests of April 15 of 2009 on the 2010 midterm elections. So what they did find is that having a Tea Party protest in one's district and having it be particularly large protest was strongly correlated, basically, to whether Tea Party candidates both, you know, won the primaries and then won those elections. And so we see that whether it's on the right or left, there's a pretty consistent story in the role of protests and shifting electoral behavior, even if those impacts on elections are modest in terms of the percentage of the vote that might be shifted. And then just about three weeks ago, a paper came out basically arguing that the same story did hold - with regard to the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer of 2020 - impacting vote share in the 2020 presidential election.
SUMMERS: You know, we've largely been backward-looking in discussing what makes protests effective or successful, but I am curious - because we're in a very different political moment here in the United States where rules and norms are changing and, in many cases, being ignored, do you think that the lessons that we've been talking about today apply to the current political moment?
CHENOWETH: I think they do. I don't have any reason to believe that the general principles of what has made democracy movements successful in the past would not apply here. There are a couple of caveats to that. The first is that the United States is a massive country. The other caveat, though, is that during the period that most of the research has been done about what makes movements succeed, that period was the period of, you know, basically U.S. global hegemony. So the sort of post-World War II period is when we saw mass nonviolent civil resistance movements become an important engine driving democratic transitions and the global spread of democracy over the next number of years and decades. But if the United States is not anymore in a position where it is even just representing that it itself is committed to democracy at home and abroad, then we are in somewhat unchartered (ph) territory.
SUMMERS: I have a question for you about what pushes people to actually take to the streets. You earlier mentioned the example of South Korea, where, of course, there was this dramatic event, this declaration of martial law that happened, and that triggered massive protests. I wonder, is it more difficult for protests to gain stream (ph) if, say, for instance, rights or the rule of law are infringed on bit by bit rather than with a big catalyzing moment like that one that we've been talking about?
CHENOWETH: I do think that a bright line like that, a catalyzing moment, can really snap people into action. And there's a sense that once you sort of break through whatever was holding the person back from participating - once they break through that barrier, whether it's fear or just apathy or demoralization - that there's actually, like, no going back. There's no way to predict what types of triggers will lead people to that outcome, but certainly a coup attempt would be one of them or some kind of sudden and shocking usurpation of power.
And then there are other - there are sort of two others that people have found in the literature that tend to be common triggers. One is a stolen election or some - an election that obviously is rife with such significant problems that basically nobody believes, really, the outcome, and then incidences of police brutality or brutality by state authorities, which can often trigger demands for accountability. And then if those demands are suppressed, that can then trigger a much broader set of demands by a much broader set of people for justice.
SUMMERS: We've been speaking with Erica Chenoweth, author and civil resistance researcher. Thank you.
CHENOWETH: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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