Effects of Protest Features on Protest Perceptions

The next session at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference starts with a paper by Pablo Jost, whose interest is in protest events. Protests often aim to generate media attention, yet such media attention is often not supportive of protests, especially when they are disruptive (or can be portrayed as such) – and this produces more critical perception and less identification with protests.

To explore this further, this project therefore studied the Website of the Last Generation climate protest movement in Germany to identify their protest events, and coded their 108 protests between November 2021 and December 2022 by type; it also analysed the 1175 articles in 22 newspapers that were published about those protests. Protests are followed by increased coverage over the text two days, but the absolute volume of attention to these protests also increased substantially towards the end of the study period. Protest types also made a difference: blocking anything (roads, runways) in particular generated more media attention.

The project also conducted a content analysis of the news articles (which is still in progress, so these results are preliminary), showing that the goals of the protest were reported less often than there was scandalisation. When activists glued themselves to roads or runways, or when protests triggered police action, the protest goals were reported more often; if people were injured during the protests, scandalised reporting often followed.

The project explored the effects of scandalisation further in an experiment, confronting participants with two different versions of a news report that used more neutral and more scandalised language. Such scandalisation had a negative effect on perceptions of the protesters’ credibility, but not on perceptions of the legitimacy of these protests.

So, protests increase coverage; protests that directly affect the public are more likely to be reported. Protests also increase coverage of the activists’ goals, and spectacular protests especially help to promote those goals, while injuries during those actions result in scandalisation. But coverage and public opinion about these protests may have evolved further after the period of study, so this may only be a temporary snapshot. Differences between news outlets of various political positions might also need to be explored.