How Does a Protest Make Change?

Photos by Patty Tang

Over the weekend, hundreds of thousands of protesters rallied in more than 1,200 locations across the country in the largest show of opposition since President Trump took office this January. Roughly 25,000 people demonstrated in Seattle, and smaller groups gathered in about 40 other locations in Washington. Washington, D.C. and New York City saw crowds of well over 100,000 each; Raleigh saw 45,000, Chicago and Boston saw some 30,000 a piece, and Atlanta about 20,000.

The big question is: Can these protests make change? Sociologists will tell you that we don’t really know whether or how protests work. But their research can tell us a few things. First, we know that over the last century, almost no protest movement that has mobilized 3.5 percent of a population has failed to achieve its goals. We know that nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed than violent ones (and to be clear, property damage does not count as violence). And we know that research suggests successful protests share four characteristics: worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment. That is, if a protest has high turnout (numbers) and gathers a seemingly unified (unity) group that really cares about the issue (commitment) and is working towards a goal non-protesters deem deserving (worthiness), the protest is more likely to succeed.

So how do this past weekend’s events stack up? Do we keep showing up? (Yes.) And what should we do next?

Why Protest?

“If I talked to you a couple weeks ago, I would have said ‘now is not the time to march,’” says Vanessa Wruble, one of the people who organized the Women’s March on January 21, 2017. At the time, the Women’s March was the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. (It was later surpassed by the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.) Now, “given what’s happening,” Wruble thinks “everyone should be out in the streets all the time.”

Research shows “that people tend to get motivated to participate in action when they have a sense of injustice,” says Lauren Duncan, a professor of psychology at Smith College. “Oftentimes that injustice is related to some sort of social identity that they have—like gender, race, sexual orientation, something like that. But it doesn’t have to be.”

For people to take the leap from a feeling of injustice to the action of protest, people also need to believe the world “could be different, and that their participation could make a difference,” says David Meyer, a sociology professor at the University of Irvine. “So, it’s the job of organizers to show that something’s wrong, suggest an alternative, and invest people with a feeling of efficacy.”

The Hands Off! Protests helped channel at least part of that: outrage over the current administration’s extreme reshaping of the federal government. And the protests were well coordinated online, so that people in all 50 states could find their nearest options to demonstrate. Whether or not the protesting organizations can suggest a better alternative—or can succeed in changing anything about the current administration—remains to be seen.

What Makes a Protest Successful?

First, we have to define what a successful protest even is. Protests arguably succeed whenever they have the “capacity to exercise power,” says Pat Gillham, a sociology professor at Western Washington University. And power can take many forms: For example, a protest may have cultural power, which is the ability to change “public opinion about a topic” or “language on a topic.” Think, for example, of the term “climate crisis,” which became more widely used after the Extinction Rebellion—or “Black Lives Matter,” which became a rallying cry after George Zimmerman was acquitted of murder in the death of Black teenager Trayvon Martin.

In some cases—such as the Black Lives Matter and the Civil Rights protests—demonstrations can, by shifting public opinion, shift electoral outcomes. “We’re talking about 1 percent swings here,” explains Sam Nadel of the Social Change Lab. “But a 1 percent swing in a general election is massive.”

Protests can also harness disruptive power—that is, the ability “to make it more costly for people and or targets of protests, like local or state government, to support the status quo,” says Gillham. For example, the civil rights movement organized sit-ins, which increased the costs of businesses continuing to engage in segregation and in some instances did lead to desegregation.

Finally, a protest may have organizational power—power to sustain a movement over the long term.

So then what makes a protest powerful? Charles Tilly, a founding father of modern sociology, first developed the idea that protests are effective when they show worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment. This “WUNC” model has since shaped much of the academic research into whether and when protests are effective.

Numbers are key, says Nadel. “Small groups of activists can make a pretty significant difference, but really all the most successful movements across history have been able to demonstrate broad support across the population.” That idea is consistent with the 3.5 percent rule—the observation that protests that mobilize at least 3.5 percent almost always prevail. In the United States, that would mean roughly 11.9 million people would need to engage in a movement to see success.

Few recent protest movements have reached that threshold: Protests after George Floyd’s murder did, marshaling between 15 and 26 million people (or between 4.4 and 7.6 percent of the U.S. population). The 2017 Women’s March, in contrast, mobilzed between 3.3 and 5.2 million people—or 1.0 to 1.6 percent of the population. And Occupy Wall Street marshaled a much smaller share of the country: roughly 70,000 people (or about 0.02 percent) on its largest day of protest.

Reliable estimates of the overall size of last weekend’s protests do not yet appear to exist, but organizers have said 600,000 people registered to participate—less than 0.2 percent of the country.

But numbers aren’t the only key features of successful protests. “Nonviolence tends to be effective,” says Nadel. So does “timing and taking advantage of existing events to capitalize on those key moments. Diversity is really important, and I use that term in the broadest sense: diversity in terms of demography and ethnicity yes, but diversity of tactics,” too.

Diversity of tactics means drawing on not just protests, but also other avenues for relief, such as litigation, backing different candidates for public office, or organizing underground support networks (such as the Jane Collective, which provided abortion care in the 1960s and early 1970s, when abortion was illegal in much of the United States).

Some research shows that having a radical flank to a social movement—which is another type of diversity in tactics—can bolster the overall movement’s chances of success as well. The Black Panthers, for example, arguably made MLK, Jr.’s policy objectives more palatable to the country as a whole because they seemed comparatively easy to swallow. The suffragettes and Black Lives Matter protests have also had more radical moments, which were followed by critical reforms. For example, rioting in Ferguson, Missouri—where a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown—led to changes in the state’s municipal court system that activists had been seeking since the Civil Rights era.

Whether a particular movement or protest can be considered “successful” also depends on the time horizon one considers. For example, in the short term, “Occupy Wall Street got a lot of grief from a lot of different directions for supposedly not knowing what they wanted,” says Bob Edwards, who recently retired from being a sociology professor at East Carolina University to run for local office. But he thinks that view sells the Occupy movement short: Viewed over a longer timeframe, Occupy “got national and local media coverage” and “pretty single-handedly put economic inequality on the national agenda.”

Since Trump’s inauguration this January, people have deployed an array of tactics, as well as more traditional protests, to oppose the President’s agenda: Almost 200 lawsuits have been filed to challenge Trump’s administrative actions—11 from WA Attorney General Nick Brown alone. Democrats are hoping to leverage the President’s unpopularity to back candidates in traditional Republican strongholds. Across the country, people are lighting Cybertrucks and Tesla showrooms on fire, selling their Tesla sedans, and dumping their Tesla stock to protest Elon Musk’s role in the federal government. Abortion funds and community support networks are working to try to help as many people as possible access abortion care, despite increasingly restrictive legal regimes.

What’s Next?

Few things stop a movement’s momentum as quickly as not having something to do next. Numbers matter, yes, but so does consistency in participation in a protest movement. (Remember Tilly’s four-part WUNC framework.)

Media attention is also important, says Brent Simpson, a sociology professor at the University of South Carolina. And in general, “we know that more extreme protests get more media attention. At the same time, they turn off a lot of people,” so organizers must weigh those costs and benefits.

But perhaps most important is infrastructure. In 2014, organizer extraordinaire Dan Cantor wrote that “you don’t organize movements. You build organizations, and if movements emerge, you may catch their energy and grow.” Edwards from East Carolina University encouraged people who want to foster protest movements to focus on “building the architecture, the infrastructure” of local societies that operates “independent of the election cycle, something that’s there all the fucking time, not something that sweeps into my town for the campaign.” This type of involvement can build organizational power and become a “viable voice for articulating concerns consistently in the community.”

The Black Lives Matter movement, for example, ticked all these boxes. The group organized very successful protests, which were well timed to highlight recent deaths of Black Americans at the hands of police and the need for reform. They also harnessed the power of the media. As activist and organizer Nicole Carty explained in a 2022 interview about the movement: “when we agitate, when we keep the story in the news, we can maintain more support and have more control over the narrative.” Finally, Black Lives Matter built a national structure with local chapters across the country, and these chapters are able to act as voices for their communities as Edwards describes. The Los Angeles chapter, for example, has met with local politicians about a proposal they call “the People’s Budget,” which would reallocate funding from the Los Angeles Police Department.

One thing that does not seem to work for building momentum is digital-only activism. According to Indivisible’s Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink, elected officials care about “advocacy that requires effort” such as phone calls, personal emails, “and especially showing up in person.” They don’t usually care about form letters or a social media post. Social media is “effectual for spreading information quickly, and it can be helpful for mobilizing people for single events,” says Gillham. “But it doesn’t contribute to WUNC.”

Most important when trying to build momentum? Not losing hope. “People who are saying there isn’t a resistance 2.0 aren’t looking hard enough,” says Nadel. Protests play a critical role in “making the impossible feel possible. Often protest is the best, or the only, tool to do that because it demonstrates that breadth of public support for a change in the status quo.”