Does Protest Affect Bystanders?

* we conducted a soft-lunch and made several changes to the design and questionaire (see prevision version of the pap) Research in the Social Sciences has studied political protest and its effects in various ways and contexts. A key assumption—specifically in research studying the effects on policy outcomes and political decision making—is that protest can affect public opinion. The idea is that social move- ments frequently take actions before the public at large fixes its opinion on an issue; meaning that protest provides crucial information for the public to adapt its preferences. A posited mecha- nism is that through their protests affect bystanders – people who do not attend such protests but observe them – by manipulating the impression of how many citizens support policy change (Wa- sow, 2020, APSR; Enos, Kaufman, Sands, 2019, APSR; Gamson, 1975, Strategy of Protest; Gillion, 2013, The Political Power of Protest). If and to what extent protest can in fact achieve this depends on the characteristics of protest— such as their size, violence, used force by the police to name just a few (see e.g.: Lohmann, 1993, APSR). Yet, since research on political protest has largely been observational (but see: Hager et al., 2021, APSR) it is difficult to draw causal inferences regarding the effects of protests on social preferences. It is also difficult to assess which segements of society are more or likely to self select into exposure to protest and how this selection moderates overall effects. In this study we set out to analyze if and how political protest can affect bystanders’ preferences and their perception of norms by relying on a survey experimental design embedded in a long- running and large-scale panel of German citizens.