Can They Win Them Over? The Effect of Minority Protests on Majority Members’ Group Attitudes

Minority protests aim to change conditions to their favor. But do these protests also lead majority members––whose power to maintain current conditions makes them crucial addressees of protests––to evaluate minority members more positively? While some research suggests that they do, other work finds that majority members interpret minority protests as threatening. We argue that the effect of minority protest on majority members’ group attitudes is conditional on their previous sympathy towards minorities, as informed by their partisanship. To test this argument, we leverage the random variation in timing around the BLM protests to estimate their differential effects on majority members’ perceptions of Black minority and white majority members. We find that this event indeed affects favorability ratings differently, depending on a majority member’s partisanship. The paper closes with a discussion of the results’ implications and avenues for future research.