'An experimental study of support for protest causes and tactics and the influence of conspiratorial beliefs' (AIC Trends & issues in crime and criminal justice No. 702, October 2024) by Anthony Morgan, Timothy Cubitt, Alexandra Voce and Isabella Voce comments
We conducted a randomised survey experiment involving 13,301 online Australians. Respondents were asked about their support for environmental, anti-lockdown and sovereign citizen protests. They were randomly allocated to one of three groups presented with different protest tactics—peaceful marching, disrupting traffic and violent clashes with police. Respondents were significantly more likely to oppose violent or disruptive protests than peaceful protests, regardless of the issue or movement in question. The strongest opposition was to anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination protests, followed by protests relating to the sovereign citizen movement. Protests about environmental issues had the most support.
The effect of conspiratorial beliefs on support for protests varied by protest cause. Belief in conspiracy theories increased support for protest violence, relative to other tactics. Support for certain protest causes and tactics is shaped by a person’s ideological beliefs.
In the last few years protest activity has increased globally (van der Zwet et al. 2022). Australia has been no exception. Recent protest activity has advocated for a range of political and social causes, including support for increased action on climate change, opposition to public health measures introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic, women’s safety, Indigenous deaths in custody and other more extreme ideological movements. There were protests in response to lockdowns and social distancing measures from very early in the pandemic (McGowan 2020), including the emergence of the freedom movement in late 2020 (ABC News 2020). There was further protest activity following the rollout of the national vaccination program in early to mid-2021 (Noble 2021). While many of these protests were peaceful, there were numerous examples of disruptive behaviour and clashes between protesters and police, resulting in large numbers of fines and arrests, as well as the hospitalisation of police officers (Seyfort & Zagon 2021). This included notable anti-vaccine mandate protests in Melbourne, which attracted widespread condemnation (Marin-Guzman 2021).
As frustration with public health measures grew, antisocial behaviour and threats of violence towards political leaders escalated (Butler 2021). In early 2022, several thousand Australians travelled in a ‘Convoy to Canberra’ to protest against a range of grievances, organised using social media and supported through crowdfunding (Britton 2022). While fringe and conspiratorial views were apparent in some of the earliest protest activity, the convoy exemplified the central role that conspiratorial beliefs, the language of the sovereign citizen movement and other ideological motives had come to play in pandemic protest narratives (Khalil & Roose 2023; Roose 2022).
While COVID-19 protests garnered significant attention, protest activity occurred in support of several other movements in this same period. It too involved a mix of tactics. Following intense bushfires in the 2019–20 summer, tens of thousands of people protested nationally in support of action on climate change and environmental policy (Regan & Yeung 2020). Conversely, in mid‑2022, Blockade Australia disrupted traffic heading into the centre of Sydney during peak hour, while concurrently protesting through Sydney’s central business district (Thompson 2022). Despite involving no more than 60 individuals, there was significant disruption to the community and a number of protesters were arrested (McGuire 2022). Two large, nationally coordinated protests were also noteworthy. Marches against Indigenous deaths in custody and systemic racism occurred in mid‑2020 (Henriques‑Gomes & Visontay 2020), while the ‘March 4 Justice’ took place in March 2021 in 40 cities in response to high-profile cases of sexual violence, with estimates of up to 110,000 attendees (Gorman 2021). These were peaceful protests that, unlike much of the pandemic-related protest activity, were planned in consultation with authorities and held in accordance with public health measures.
In attempting to draw public attention to their social or political cause, protesters may use disruptive and at times aggressive tactics (Andrews & Caren 2010). Often this depends on the perceived legitimacy of the government of the day—protest violence is more likely when the government is perceived as coercive rather than legitimate (Sullivan 2018). Some protest groups can be unpredictable and volatile, attracting individuals with a greater propensity for violence (Maguire et al. 2016; Tyler et al. 2018). However, it is also clear that protest violence can be specific to the situation and is more likely to occur when the action is disorganised or spontaneous (Gustafson 2020; Ives & Lewis 2020), when there are counter-protesters present (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation 2020), and during periods of heightened emotion and tension following some sort of triggering event (Nassauer 2016). The use of more assertive policing measures can lead protesters to escalate to violence in competition with police tactics (della Porta 2014). But this is not always straightforward. What constitutes lawful or violent protest can vary between places and also over time, particularly in political and legal environments where tolerance for public protest may be lowered. This has implications for law enforcement, whose role it is to maintain civil order and enforce protest laws, and can shape how they respond but also how that response may be perceived.
The majority of Australians support the right to protest (Amnesty International 2022). However, public support for activism may be influenced by the tactics used by protesters, even among individuals who are personally aligned with the social or political cause (Feinberg, Willer & Kovacheff 2020; Muñoz & Anduiza 2019; Simpson, Willer & Feinberg 2018). Of course, what constitutes violent action is subjective, and can depend on the political beliefs of the individual (Hsiao and Radnitz 2020). Even so, the negative effects of violent protest have been shown in survey experiments (Simpson, Willer & Feinberg 2018) and in studies of real-world protest violence (Huet-Vaughn 2013; Muñoz & Anduiza 2019). Further, regardless of an individual’s core ideology, violent protest action can reduce support for the cause overall, and diminish identification with a movement, with observers reporting the action to be immoral (Feinberg, Willer & Kovacheff 2020). This can lead to fewer protesters being willing to engage in subsequent protest activity—although violence by the state can have the opposite effect (Steinert-Threlkeld, Joo & Chan 2022).
Protest tactics can also be influenced by a group’s underlying ideology. The onset of the pandemic saw an increase in protests endorsing conspiratorial views (Khalil & Roose 2023), which have been associated with increased support for violence (Uscinski et al. 2022). Recent research has found that individuals who show greater commitment to conspiratorial beliefs are also more likely to endorse ideological violence (Vegetti & Littvay 2021). Further, these beliefs are associated with support for political violence, particularly where they co-occur with mental health issues (Baum et al. 2023). It is not clear how these findings apply to the Australian context, particularly as it relates to contemporary protest movements and the recent growth of certain ideological movements and conspiratorial beliefs. To measure differences in support for different protest causes and tactics, we conducted a randomised survey experiment. We examined scenarios involving fringe movements, including sovereign citizen and anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination protests (Khalil & Roose 2023), and more widely-accepted mainstream movements, including action on climate change (Bradley et al. 2022). We also examined the extent to which support was influenced by belief in conspiracy theories. This research has implications for both protest organisers seeking to generate community support for their movement and authorities who are responsible for ensuring that protest activity is lawful and non-violent.
