‘If a fight starts, watch the crowd’: The effect of violence on popular support for social movements
| Published date | 01 July 2019 |
| Date | 01 July 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343318820575 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
‘If a fight starts, watch the crowd’:
The effect of violence on popular
support for social movements
Jordi Mun
˜oz
Department of Political Science, University of Barcelona
Eva Anduiza
Department of Political Science and Public Law, Universitat Auto
`noma de Barcelona
Abstract
Social movements often face tactic diversification. In otherwise nonviolent movements, some groups or radical flanks
may resort to violent actions such as street rioting. This article analyzes the impact that these violent episodes can
have on popular support for the movement as a whole. To estimate the causal effect of violence, it exploits an
unexpected riot outbreak that occurred during the fieldwork of a face-to-face survey in Barcelona in May 2016, led
by a squat group linked to the anti-austerity movement known as the 15-M or indignados that emerged during the
financial crisis. By comparing respondents interviewed before and after the riots, it finds that the street violence
episode reduced support for the 15-M movement by 12 percentage points on average. However, the magnitude of
the effect is highly conditional on the respondents’ predispositions towards the movement. Core supporters, that are
expected to share the frame of the movement in justifying violent actions, are the least affected by the violent
outbreak. On the other extreme, weak supporters, opposers, and non-aligned citizens reduce their support to a larger
extent. Results are robust to different specifications and a wide range of robustness checks. These findings have
potentially important implications for movements concerned with broadening their support base.
Keywords
15-M, indignados, natural experiment, protest, radical flanks, social movements, violence
Introduction
Following Donald Trump’s inauguration in early 2017, a
wave of protests swept the USA. Most of them were
peaceful, colorful demonstrations and civil disobedience
actions. But some protesters also engaged in violent riot-
ing. This is a common pattern in many social movements,
from the civil rights movement in the 1960s, to the labor
movement or even the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany:
some of their components – often the majority – tend to
engage in peaceful mass protests, or small-scale civil dis-
obedience, while others engage in more violent tactics,
often following incentives to diversify tactics within a
movement (Cunningham, Dahl & Fruge, 2017).
Protest movements in democratic contexts have a
wide array of tactical choices at their disposal. While
sometimes the repertoire itself has an intrinsic value to
the participants, often the choice of a specific set of
protest instruments is derived from an assessment of the
costs and potential benefits of each course of action.
Violent protest is under most conditions considered
more costly than nonviolent actions. However, assessing
the effectiveness of various protest tactics might be more
difficult, as it involves at least two main challenges. The
first one is defining what exactly constitutes a ‘success’ of
a protest movement. This has often been operationalized
as policy or regime change, but social movements can
also have more general or inte rmediate goals, such as
Corresponding author:
jordi.munoz@ub.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2019, Vol. 56(4) 485–498
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343318820575
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