It is possible that protests motivated both Democrats and Republicans. The extent of this is unknown, the dust has barely settled. I suspect it will be an area of much research.
"We examine individuals’ decisions to attend protests during the summer of 2020. ... We also provide evidence suggesting that protesting appears to be rational, i.e., a deliberate and intentional choice to be civically engaged that is responsive to costs and issue salience... Together, our findings challenge claims by partisan pundits that protests are driven by extremists with fringe views or that the 2020 movements were diametrically opposed along partisan identity lines. ..."
Can protests cause political change, or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences? We address this question by studying the Tea Party movement in the United States, which rose to prominence through coordinated rallies across the country on Tax Day, April 15, 2009. We exploit variation in rainfall on the day of these rallies as an exogenous source of variation in attendance. We show that good weather at this initial, coordinating event had significant consequences for the subsequent local strength of the movement, increased public support for Tea Party positions, and led to more Republican votes in the 2010 midterm elections. Policy making was also affected, as incumbents responded to large protests in their district by voting more conservatively in Congress. Our estimates suggest significant multiplier effects: an additional protester increased the number of Republican votes by a factor well above 1. Together our results show that protests can build political movements that ultimately affect policy making and that they do so by influencing political views rather than solely through the revelation of existing political preferences.
It's a protest. Protests work. For example, this paper used rainfall as a source of exogenous variation to measure the effect of the Tea Party protests.
Can protests cause political change, or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences? We address this question by studying the Tea Party movement in the United States, which rose to prominence through coordinated rallies across the country on Tax Day, April 15, 2009. We exploit variation in rainfall on the day of these rallies as an exogenous source of variation in attendance. We show that good weather at this initial, coordinating event had significant consequences for the subsequent local strength of the movement, increased public support for Tea Party positions, and led to more Republican votes in the 2010 midterm elections. Policy making was also affected, as incumbents responded to large protests in their district by voting more conservatively in Congress. Our estimates suggest significant multiplier effects: an additional protester increased the number of Republican votes by a factor well above 1. Together our results show that protests can build political movements that ultimately affect policy making and that they do so by influencing political views rather than solely through the revelation of existing political preferences.
I'd be more interested in data a few years from now to show if protesting really did anything? Obviously this is a right we must protect and embolden, however for certain causes protesting in this day and age seems to do little to elicit actual political action or change - sometimes it even does the opposite.
What you're talking about is counterfactual inference, which is a non-trivial problem even in well-controlled settings. The effect of large-scale protests would probably be very difficult to quantify with the rigour you're alluding to. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
Your and a sibling comment want to make the Floyd protests into an explanation for the data… while the trend both existed before the event and has continued afterwards
I'm happy when people are motivated to protest, regardless of the issue or political affiliation. Better than just taking it on the chin, over and over, slowly boiling as politicians make things worse.
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