5. According to four economist from Harvard, protests may affect
policy but not in the way you may think. The protest itself is
unlikely to influence policy writers, however, the motivated
protest attendees are likely to become involved with more
political platforms that create change.
6. “It is personal interaction within small groups of
citizens that serves as a crucial channel for the
transmission of new political views and that
leads to increases in political activism.” said
Andreas Madestam, economist from Harvard.
7. Protests are not just for
political change, but
also social.
If we are to measure
efficiency based off of
policy change than
many profound protests
would be deemed
unsuccessful, such as
NoDAPL.
8. Autumn Raynne, co-chair of
University of Denver’s Native
Student Alliance and organizer of
the NoDAPL movement on DU
campus states, “I think they
[protests] can [be effective] if
enough people get behind it. With
our protest for DAPL, it was
considered the biggest protest ever
or at least in two years. After our
protests was done, university
administration had to come up with
or start coming up with a policy to
accommodate or combat large
scaled protests in the future.”
10. Protesting isn’t as easy as it looks, particularly if the
overall goal is to influence policy.
11. Here are 3 tips for turning protests into policy:
1) Make your message salient.
Length of protest that are longer than a day,
have 100 or more people involved, have police
presence, have political organization affiliation,
and if a crime or death occurred are all ways to
get policy writers attention.
12. 2) Be united.
There is only so much time
that the typical citizen can
participate in democracy,
responding to each
executive order is
unrealistic.
Therefore, it is more
beneficial to be united and
have specific goals.
13. 3) Be proactive.
Protests where
demonstrators attempt
to prevent an action
from happening are
more effective than
reactive protest in
which people protest in
response to an action.
14. Students make up a large
portion of protesters.
Therefore, it is particularly
important for them to be
educated on the efficiency
of protests in both a
political and social scale.
