With a little help from mass media: The effect of Climate strike Switzerland on electoral behaviour

Does grassroots protest matter to citizens? Scholars interested in inferring a causal effect of local protest events on public opinion tend to adopt a difference-in-difference design to investigate differences between treated and untreated municipalities. In this paper, I demonstrate that this approach has theoretical and methodological downfalls. I argue that mass media coverage of protest events can better explain changes in electoral behaviour. Recent large-scale protests of environmental social movement organisations such as Fridays For Future receive considerable media attention, thereby potentially sparking public debates about climate change. While most research focuses on the relationship between grassroots protest and public agenda-setting, it has not been sufficiently addressed whether an altered discourse affects citizens’ electoral behaviour. In this paper, I engage with these two possible paths to influence. I explore whether citizens living in communes that registered protest events of the social movement organisation Climate strike Switzerland were more likely to vote for the Green party in the 2019 Swiss national elections. I further examine whether mass media coverage influenced this relation. While geographical proximity to protest as measured here cannot explain changes in electoral behaviour, the results indicate that an increase in the cantonal share of newspaper articles on Climate strike Switzerland from 0% to 0.097% leads to an increase of 5.3% in the predicted vote share of the Green party.