How Effective are Protests at Shaping Public Discourse?

A large literature recognises the reliance of protest movements on media coverage to diffuse their message to the wider public. Yet, few empirical studies have looked beyond direct coverage of protest events to explore how protests shape the wider public discourse about their issue. Does initial coverage of a protest tends to trigger favourable changes in public discourse from the protesters' perspective? If so, does this depend on tactics used? To answer these questions, I use computational methods to analyse the discursive effects of a decade of environmental protests in the UK. Using protest groups' own tweets, I identify the set of claims advanced and opposed by each protest. I then measure the visibility of these claims in a corpus of over 100,000 news articles from 15 national news outlets, before and after relevant protest events. The results indicate that while protests are able to boost the volume of relevant discourse, they are less effective at shifting the polarity of the discourse in their preferred direction. I also find that disruptive protests are less effective than non-disruptive protests in shaping the issue-agenda, conditional on event coverage. Taken together, these findings have important implications for the strategic choices facing protest movements.