Fighting For a Better Life: Protests and Public Opinion in South Africa

How do peaceful or violent protests cause shifts in public opinion? Protest is a way for citizens to express their dissatisfaction and sentiments towards governments and policies when other political actions, such as voting, are deemed insufficient. Protests may put direct pressure on governments to address certain policy issues, but also indirectly through a shift in public opinion. In this paper, we examine the effects of protest on public support for various policies using evidence from the case of South Africa, where citizens regularly engage in community protest to express dissatisfaction with poor public service on issues such as water, electricity and sanitation. We marshal evidence from two nationwide online survey experiments and protest event data matched with multiple waves of another nationwide survey on public opinion in South Africa. First, we randomly expose respondents to images of violent or peaceful protest. Second, we run a conjoint experiment with information on different dimensions of service delivery protest and examine how they shift policy support. Finally, we test the effects on public opinion of actual protest events using multiple waves of observational survey data, where we match geo-coded conflict data with survey data in a difference-in-difference design. We find that peaceful protest tactics and specific blame attribution gain the most sympathy and support, while violent tactics and no blame attribution run the risk of causing a backlash effect of public opinion