Violent Protests Backfire

This seems obvious to me.  I don't understand why anybody with an IQ higher than a peanut would not expect this.

Of course, there will be anti-social people who use protests as an excuse for looting and law-breaking, in some cases exactly in order to turn opinion against the protests,  but for those who support the protestors to excuse the violence is both immoral and counterproductive.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023118803189

Brent Simpson, Robb Willer, Matthew Feinberg
First Published October 11, 2018 Research Article
https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023118803189


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Existing research generally finds that violence by protesters reduces public support for the protesters and can even erode support for the causes they support. Drawing on a large data set of more than 300 resistance campaigns against political regimes and foreign occupiers, Stephan and Chenoweth (2008) found that nonviolent movements were more effective at winning domestic and international support and at winning loyalty shifts within a regime’s security forces. Other studies have shown that public support for a movement wanes when it uses violent tactics, and that violence damages the perceived legitimacy of groups (Wang and Piazza 2016). For instance, one recent analysis found that in the 1960s, regions featuring nonviolent protests by black civil rights activists saw increased Democratic voting by whites, whereas regions where violent civil rights protests occurred saw decreased Democratic vote share among whites (Wasow 2017). Indeed, Wasow’s analysis suggests that backlash to violent civil rights protests could have been sufficient to tip the 1968 election in Richard Nixon’s favor.

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