EA - An expert survey on social movements and protest by James Özden

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: An expert survey on social movements and protest, published by James Özden on July 12, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryWe're very excited to release some new research that Social Change Lab has been working on for a while. We teamed up with Apollo Academic Surveys to create an expert survey of academics who study social movements and protest. We surveyed 120 academics across Political Science, Sociology and other relevant disciplines, and picked many academics because we thought they had made significant contributions to the understanding of social movements and protest. We hope this survey provides some strategic insight that is useful for EAs working on a range of important issues.You can see the full results on the Apollo Academics Surveys website, but we wanted to share a few findings we found really interesting. We'll also be releasing our own report (with greater analysis, interpretation and limitations) soon. However, in this short post we'll cover some of the expert views on the following topics:Which are the most important strategic and organisational factors that lead to social movements succeedingThe most common reasons social movements fail to achieve their goalsThe effectiveness of disruptive protest based on what kind of issue you're working on (e.g. high public support vs low public support)The effectiveness of disruptive protest within animal advocacySome things we think are interesting from the full results but we excluded for brevity:The extent to which a social movement's success is related to factors within their control (e.g. tactics and strategy) vs factors outside their control (e.g. wider political context)To what degree polarisation is inevitable or necessarily a bad outcomeWhat intermediate goals are important to focus on if you care about ultimately passing government policy.Additionally, you can click "See Additional Participant responses" to read what experts wrote to give additional context to their quantitative responses.ResultsImportant factors for social movement successOut of the factors we asked about, experts thought the most important tactical and strategic factor for a social movement's success is "the strategic use of nonviolent disruptive tactics". Overall, 69% of experts said this factor was either "very important" or "quite important".Figure 1: Answers to Question 3 from the survey: "How important do you think the following tactical and strategic factors are in contributing to a social movement's success?We were really struck by the contradiction between what the public (78% of people think that disruptive protests hinder the cause) and the media say about disruptive protests and what academics said. The experts who study social movements not only believe that strategic disruption can be an effective tactic, but that it is the most important tactical factor for a social movement's success (of the factors we asked about). This, and other relevant evidence, suggests we shouldn't necessarily take people's first reactions as the best indicator of effective protest. We include many more results on disruptive protest further down.Experts were also asked which factors of a social movement's governance are the most important in driving success. The factor they rated most highly was 'the ability to mobilise and scale quickly in response to external events'. The factor they rated least important, possibly a surprise to activists themselves, was 'decentralised decision-making'Figure 2: Answers to Question 4 from the survey: "How important do you think the following governance and organisational factors are in contributing to a social movement's success?"Common reasons social movements failThe most commonly cited reason for social movements to fail was internal conflict and movement infighting, closely fo...