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From anti-war marches in the 1960s to the Tea Party rallies of 2010 and the progressive protests in 2018, marching in the streets are a fixture of modern American life. But do protests actually accomplish anything in terms of election results or the balance of party power?

Coauthored by Sarah A. Soule at Stanford Graduate School of Business and Daniel Q. Gillion at the University of Pennsylvania, the study finds that spikes in both liberal and conservative protest activity can increase or decrease a candidate’s vote by enough to change the final outcome.

“Many people are skeptical that protests matter to electoral outcomes, but our paper finds that they have a profound effect on voter behavior,” says Soule. “Liberal protests lead Democrats to vote on the issues that resonate for them, and conservative protests lead Republicans to do the same. It happens on both sides of the ideological […]