Jacobs, Michael; (2025) Better to be Maligned than Ignored? The Use of (Disruptive) Protest to Shape Public Discourse and Public Opinion. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

To maximise attention in the media, some protest groups opt to use disruptive tactics de- signed to upset or obstruct bystanders or authorities. In doing so, they risk alienating onlookers and harming their persuasive appeal. This thesis examines this trade off - be- tween capturing attention and persuading onlookers – over three empirical studies. The first study analyses the effects of tactical choices on the quantity of coverage protests re- ceive in the media. I develop a computer-assisted pipeline to extract protest events from the tweets of 85 environmental and economic protest groups from the UK between 2010 and 2020. Using this dataset, I show that confrontational tactics are a highly effective way for protesters to boost media coverage. In the second study, I examine how tactics moderate the persuasiveness of protest through a survey experiment of UK adults. I show that while more extreme tactics are less persuasive than moderate tactics, there is no evidence they cause onlookers to reduce support for the targeted policy, relative to pre-treatment beliefs. The third study looks beyond direct coverage of protest events to assess the effects of envi- ronmental protests on wider public discourse. Making use of transformer-based sentence embeddings, I identify claims in the media that are aligned or opposed to the claims of the protesters. I show that – conditional on receiving coverage – non-disruptive protests are more effective than disruptive protests in boosting the volume of relevant discourse, but neither disruptive nor non-disruptive protests have a meaningful effect on the polar- ity of the discourse. Taken together, these studies help clarify the bounds of what can be achieved using disruption as part of a media-centered strategy, showing that while disrup- tion dampens the persuasive and discursive effects of protest, there is little evidence that it sets back the cause of the protesters compared to a ‘no protest’ counterfactual.

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