Hi James, thanks for this and I feel like this research is super-helpful. As you know, we at Giving Green have also explored the question of protest (as a form of what we call "outsider legislative advocacy"), and are also generally bullish on these techniques. But also, (as you mention), I think only a small minority of protest movements are really successful. We've had a lot of trouble identifying organizations we want to recommend in the context of climate policy in the US.
We're looking forward to applying your findings as our search continues!
Hi Dan - thanks for this! Definitely agree in that protest movements can be hits-based and most don't do much but the best ones can be hugely influential. That's definitely one of the hardest questions to resolve e.g. how do we predict which movements will fall into the latter bucket a priori, hence our work on identifying factors of successful movements. We're planning on doing some more work on this in the next few months so will keep you posted and definitely hope it's helpful to Giving Green!
Really interesting topic, thanks for sharing James! I was wondering whether you could share any info about your lit review methods (e.g., how you found your included articles)?
Thanks Emily, much appreciated! I also really enjoyed your recent work on interventions that influence animal product consumption so thanks for doing that.
For methodology, that's a good point and definitely something we should include more information on so will do that for an updated version in the near future. Not sure if you saw it but we do have a database of resources we compiled whilst doing this if you want to see the inputs.
On how we actually found the included pieces, this was a mix of methods, and we didn't do it in a systematic way akin to your work, although we might consider doing this in the future (suggestions welcome if you think is a good idea!). As we were mainly doing this for our own understanding and getting a lay of the land, we didn't think it was too crucial to do a systematic analysis (and our advisors also suggested this). But a few of the ways we did find papers:
Tools such as Google Scholar, ResearchRabbit and Elicit that helps find studies adjacent to your question or other studies you're interested in. We would use keyword searches such as "protest outcomes", "protest effectiveness", "impacts of protest", etc. for the outcomes, and similar variations of keywords for the success factors work. This is how we found the majority of the useful studies.
We looked at the research groups and prior publications of basically all the academics we found using the above method, which was especially useful to find newer papers and other academics who were newer in the field doing this work (e.g. just joined a relevant research group)
We interviewed 5 academics who had some influential papers in the various fields and asked them to recommend us the most important / key papers in the field which was useful to make sure we didn't miss anything crucial (we probably found 3-4 additional papers like this).
Someone else had conducted a systematic analysis (sadly not public) on an adjacent sub-field within social movements so we found some useful papers this way too.
Quite roughly, I'll outline some of the criteria we used:
We only included studies that utilised protest for things other than regime change (e.g. we didn't include Erica Chenoweth's famous work on toppling dictators as this isn't really relevant to the types of protest we're interested in)
We didn't include studies from protests prior to the 1960s. Even though this boundary is slightly fuzzy, we think the political context from prior to this time was too different to current times to be useful.
We focused primarily on empirical papers rather than theory-based ones, although we did include a small amount of theoretical papers to explain the mechanism behind some of the findings we observed
We included study designs using observational and experimental methods
As there's only one meta-analyses on this topic (from the 1980s) we included mainly primary research papers and didn't have the option to reply on meta-analyses or systematic reviews.
In reality, there weren't that many papers that fit all our criteria as this is a reasonably small and under-studied field, so we think we covered the vast majority of papers that fit our criteria above
Really impressive work! I think the idea that protest movements could be very high-impact is pretty convincing. It's a lot of ground to cover to try and find more concrete answers to how much impact movements have and how this can be maximised but I think this report makes good progress towards that.
More generally, great to see in-depth research on plausibly impactful topics that we've not looked at much as a community.
Thanks Ben - this is much appreciated! Agreed there's still lots more work to be done to find these plausibly high-impact options, so fingers crossed we can make some decent headway. Likewise to you on Effective Self-Help, great to see your research on that front!
Hi James, thanks for this and I feel like this research is super-helpful. As you know, we at Giving Green have also explored the question of protest (as a form of what we call "outsider legislative advocacy"), and are also generally bullish on these techniques. But also, (as you mention), I think only a small minority of protest movements are really successful. We've had a lot of trouble identifying organizations we want to recommend in the context of climate policy in the US.
We're looking forward to applying your findings as our search continues!
Hi Dan - thanks for this! Definitely agree in that protest movements can be hits-based and most don't do much but the best ones can be hugely influential. That's definitely one of the hardest questions to resolve e.g. how do we predict which movements will fall into the latter bucket a priori, hence our work on identifying factors of successful movements. We're planning on doing some more work on this in the next few months so will keep you posted and definitely hope it's helpful to Giving Green!
Really interesting topic, thanks for sharing James! I was wondering whether you could share any info about your lit review methods (e.g., how you found your included articles)?
Thanks Emily, much appreciated! I also really enjoyed your recent work on interventions that influence animal product consumption so thanks for doing that.
For methodology, that's a good point and definitely something we should include more information on so will do that for an updated version in the near future. Not sure if you saw it but we do have a database of resources we compiled whilst doing this if you want to see the inputs.
On how we actually found the included pieces, this was a mix of methods, and we didn't do it in a systematic way akin to your work, although we might consider doing this in the future (suggestions welcome if you think is a good idea!). As we were mainly doing this for our own understanding and getting a lay of the land, we didn't think it was too crucial to do a systematic analysis (and our advisors also suggested this). But a few of the ways we did find papers:
Quite roughly, I'll outline some of the criteria we used:
Really impressive work! I think the idea that protest movements could be very high-impact is pretty convincing. It's a lot of ground to cover to try and find more concrete answers to how much impact movements have and how this can be maximised but I think this report makes good progress towards that.
More generally, great to see in-depth research on plausibly impactful topics that we've not looked at much as a community.
Thanks Ben - this is much appreciated! Agreed there's still lots more work to be done to find these plausibly high-impact options, so fingers crossed we can make some decent headway. Likewise to you on Effective Self-Help, great to see your research on that front!