Resource Center

Protests can affect public opinion, public discourse and voting behavior, but it’s less clear that protests directly influence policymaking. Specifically, impacts of protest on policy seems highly context dependent, on factors such as existing political structures and current public opinion. The effect sizes of protest on public opinion and voting behavior are somewhat small, yet quite significant in the realm of politics, with shifts of approximately 2-5% found via natural experiments. There is strong evidence that protest can be effective in North America and Western Europe, specifically within issues of civil rights, climate change, and social welfare. This resource argues that the evidence for protests inspiring short-term and medium-term change is much stronger than the evidence for long-term change—but that’s because of the difficulty of studying the direct effects of protests on long-term outcomes.

Progressive narratives resonate more strongly than opposition messaging with communities of color, persuadable voters, and undecided voters. Climate is a top tier issues for persuadable voters: 64% percent of persuadable voters would be more likely to vote for a candidate who wanted to “move us toward reliable, clean and renewable sources of energy that create high-quality union jobs and curb damage to our climate.” Including the goals of “creating high-quality union jobs” increases support among all sub-groups of voters (base, persuadable, and conflicted) by 5-10%. This survey included many different kinds of messages on many different issues.

In the face of rising gasoline prices, use themes such as “American,” “independence”, and “freedom” when messaging about clean energy . This resource studied the different possible messages to use to boost support for clean energy, concern about climate change, and views on moving away from fossil fuels. The message that increased support for clean energy most highlighted the American-ness and independence of clean energy: “It’s time to move quickly towards clean energy. Clean energy is American energy. It’s 100% made in America, and it stays in America.” This message boosted support by 10.2% (compared to a control group that received no message about energy or climate), which performed better than the other six messages. A message that prioritized climate risks still significantly decreased support for fossil fuels. In addition to “American energy” and “clean energy for climate” messages, others tested were “clean energy is cheaper,” “clean energy is sensible,” “blame oil companies,” “dependency is dangerous,” and “freedom energy.”

There are some key ways for movements to incorporate strategic visuals into actions, campaigns, and trainings. A cohesive visual strategy translates disconnected technical skills from visual storytelling crafts into a plan to meet our movements’ goals. One key is the “distribution” of movement visuals: at actions, then broadcast via social media and through news media coverage. You should be able to tell “the story” of any action in a couple visuals (that could be posted on social media as a narrative). A helpful timeline for action visuals includes, in order: preparing supplies; planning, training, artbuilds; seeing the community respond; doing the action; talking about how the action felt. Various types of actions that need strong visuals are: rallies, marches, sit-ins, banner drops, blockades, and hold outs. This resource also includes some tips on best moments of an action to photograph and lots of sample action photos.

This post includes climate and environment headlines, data points, and key takeaways from recent public polls – including new polling on the energy crisis and gas prices, a new poll of coastal Americans’ attitudes about the climate crisis and policy solutions to address it, new polling on clean energy provisions in President Biden’s economic plan, and a new poll of young voters on President Biden’s approach to climate.