Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Did Black Lives Matter Protests Change Public Opinion?

Did Black Lives Matter Protests Change Public Opinion? Protest events affect public opinion on the issue of interest. However, the extent to which an individual’s proximity to protests impacts public opinion is less examined. Does a protest event occurring nearby, i.e., within an individual’s neighborhood, impact their opinion? Do protests that happen further away, perhaps in the next county, have the same impact on public opinion? This study analyzes the impact of exposure to protests by focusing on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in 2020 using public opinion data from Iowa merged with protest locations in Iowa. Specifically, we examine public support for BLM and for defunding the police. We evaluate the role of distance through a discrete mileage cut-off and a distance decay function. Our analysis shows that people living closer to protests show greater support for the BLM movement in general and, to a less extent, for defunding the police. The results suggest that protests may affect public opinion, but only within a very narrow range of a few miles. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png American Politics Research SAGE

Did Black Lives Matter Protests Change Public Opinion?

Loading next page...
 
/lp/sage/did-black-lives-matter-protests-change-public-opinion-z3iINL400S

References (57)

Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2023
ISSN
1532-673X
eISSN
1552-3373
DOI
10.1177/1532673x231175625
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Protest events affect public opinion on the issue of interest. However, the extent to which an individual’s proximity to protests impacts public opinion is less examined. Does a protest event occurring nearby, i.e., within an individual’s neighborhood, impact their opinion? Do protests that happen further away, perhaps in the next county, have the same impact on public opinion? This study analyzes the impact of exposure to protests by focusing on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in 2020 using public opinion data from Iowa merged with protest locations in Iowa. Specifically, we examine public support for BLM and for defunding the police. We evaluate the role of distance through a discrete mileage cut-off and a distance decay function. Our analysis shows that people living closer to protests show greater support for the BLM movement in general and, to a less extent, for defunding the police. The results suggest that protests may affect public opinion, but only within a very narrow range of a few miles.

Journal

American Politics ResearchSAGE

Published: Nov 1, 2023

Keywords: Black Lives Matter; protests; public opinion; spatial proximity

There are no references for this article.