When Do Protests Succeed in Changing Public Discourse?

This research will aim to answer the question: when do protests succeed in changing public debate? This question is a matter of ongoing debate among social movement activists and is also of interest to theorists of democracy, who seek to understand the role that protests and social movements can and do play in elevating otherwise excluded voices. Previous studies of the discursive effects of social movements have tended either to be qualitative - focusing on a handful of cases and therefore limiting their ability to draw general conclusions - or if quantitative, have focused narrowly on attention to the movement's issue, and not dug deeper into whether the protest has changed the terms of the debate. This project will use text-as-data methods, capitalising on increasingly available textual data from digital news sources, social media, and parliamentary debates, to enable better and larger scale measurement of discursive impacts. Specifically, I will look to measure not just the salience of movements' issues, but also changes in the way they are discussed across public forums. With these measures, the research will seek insights into the effectiveness of various protest strategies using time-series cross-section analysis of a large sample of protests in multiple countries.