Previously, I reviewed the five strongest studies on protest outcomes and concluded that peaceful protests probably work (credence: 90%).

But what about disruptive or violent protests?

Peaceful protests use nonviolent, non-disruptive tactics such as picketing and marches.

Disruptive protests use nonviolent, in-your-face tactics such as civil disobedience, sit-ins, and blocking roads.

Violent protests use violence.

There isn’t much evidence on the other two categories of protest. My best guesses are:

• Violent protests probably don’t work. (credence: 80%)
• Violent protests may reduce support for a cause, but it’s unclear. (credence: 40%)
• For disruptive protests, it’s hard to say whether they have a positive or negative impact on balance. I’m about evenly split on whether a randomly-chosen disruptive protest is net helpful, neutral, or harmful.
• A typical disruptive protest doesn’t work as well a typical peaceful protest. (credence: 80%)
• Peaceful protests are a better idea than disruptive protests. (credence: 90%)

Contents

• Contents
• Violent protests
• Disruptive protests
• Conclusion
• Notes

Violent protests

Three lines of evidence suggest that violent protests make things worse:

• Exactly one quasi-experimental study (Wasow 2020¹).
• A meta-analysis of lab experiments (Orazani et al. 2021²).
• Various observational studies.

I discussed Wasow (2020)¹ when I reviewed natural experiments on protest outcomes. Wasow (2020) uses rainfall as a way to randomize treatment. Quoting myself:

The idea is that protests often get canceled when it rains. If you look at voting patterns in places where it rained on protest day compared to where it didn’t rain, you should be able to isolate the causal effect of protests. The rain effectively randomizes where protests occur.

Rather than using rainfall directly, the rainfall method uses rainfall shocks—that is, unexpectedly high or low rainfall relative to what was expected for that location and date. This avoids any confounding effect of average rainfall levels.

The quasi-experimental evidence from Wasow (2020) suggests that violent Civil Rights protests backfired: public support went down in places where protests occurred.

Orazani et al. (2021)² is a meta-analysis of lab experiments. The experiments showed people news articles about (real or hypothetical) violent or nonviolent protests and measured their favorability toward the protesters’ cause. The meta-analysis found that:

• Nonviolent advocacy had a positive effect (d = 0.25, p < .00001)
• Violence had a non-significant negative effect (d = –0.04, 95% CI [–0.19, 0.12], p = .65)

This evidence suggests three things:

• Nonviolent protests work.
• Violent protests don’t work.
• Violent protests don’t strongly backfire—violent protests had a negative effect, but it was small and not statistically significant.

There are many observational studies on violent protests, with mixed results. A literature review by Shuman et al. (2024)³ wrote:

[T]here is some, although more mixed, evidence that even entirely violent protests can sometimes be effective for policy-related outcomes. For example, research on the violent 1992 Los Angeles Riots increased support for local policy reforms when policy referenda came up for a vote soon after, particularly among people who were more proximally exposed to the disruptive violence (although target audience in terms of resistance was not examined). Another study that did examine moderation by target audience found that physical proximity to Palestinian violence increased support among Israelis for making policy concessions, and that this effect was stronger for traditional right-wing, hawkish, groups. However, there is also conflicting evidence. For example, similar research found that exposure to political violence led to harsher policy attitudes among Israelis (although moderation by target audience was not assessed). Similarly, research focused on voting rather than policy found that the outbreaks of violence during the Civil Rights Movement increased support for social control framing of the issue and Republican vote share.

The language from Shuman et al. attributes causality to the cited studies, which I don’t believe is appropriate. I’m quoting this passage for the purpose of illustrating that observational studies on violent protests have found varying results.

Disruptive protests

I found two experimental studies on disruptive protests. They showed participants news articles about protests and asked them how strongly they supported the protesters’ cause.

Feinberg et al. (2017)⁴ ran three experiments on three different causes (animal rights; BLM; anti-Trump). They found that people were more likely to express support for a cause after reading about a peaceful protest than a disruptive protest. Two of the three experiments did not include control groups, so they don’t tell us whether the absolute effect of disruptive protests was positive or negative. The third study (with a control group) found that disruptive protests had a backfire effect.

Bugden (2020)⁵ found that reading an article about a peaceful climate protest increased support. Disruptive protests worked worse than peaceful protests, but still better than the control. This study also found a (non-significant) increase in support due to violent protests, which disagrees with some prior results (the Orazani et al. (2021)² meta-analysis, which did not include Bugden (2020), found a non-significant negative effect).

An observational study by Ostarek et al. (2024)⁶ conducted surveys directly before and after a disruptive protest, which is better than the typical observational study. They found that support was higher after the protest than before.

This evidence is mixed on whether disruptive protests work; and the quality of evidence is much weaker than for peaceful protests.

Conclusion

It looks like violent protests don’t work, and there’s a good chance that they backfire. This is good news—it means we don’t live in the Least Convenient Possible World where you have to commit violence to achieve your goals.

Disruptive protests might work, but the evidence is mixed and weak. The evidence supporting peaceful protests is much stronger, which makes them the better tactic.

Posted on Nov 19, 2025

Notes