We judge activism by the wrong measures: four ways we mismeasure whether protest works

Published on October 5, 2026 4:07 PM GMT Epistemic status: I've been an academic, climate activist and research lead in Extinction Rebellion UK's Data Analysis and Insights Circle. I co-authored most of the studies below. I am writing in a personal capacity, drawing on extensive research into climate activism. Summary People often decide whether a protest worked from a next-day poll or a hostile headline. I believe this is the wrong evidence. I see four common mistakes: polling the public when the targets are elites, measuring too soon, trusting what people say over what they do, and generalising from one audience to another. I end with five suggestions for funders and evaluators. Most apply to any movement that protests, including animal advocacy.   Most people in the UK accept that climate change is real, and most are worried about it. The majority (66%) even support nonviolent direct action to protect the UK's nature (Guardian). Yet very few take part in collective action. In 2023, five years after it was founded, only about 0.25% of the UK population (roughly 170,000 people) had joined Extinction Rebellion, a major climate activism group. That gap between sympathy and participation is where a lot of arguments about whether protest "works" go wrong. Someone points to a poll showing the public dislikes a tactic, or a hostile headline the morning after, and concludes the action failed. Since 2020, I have spent a lot of time studying climate activism. The work includes a review of 50 studies, national surveys, a field experiment with around 350,000 Facebook users, a media analysis and a survey of over 1,000 activists. My conclusion is that we often judge activism by the wrong measures. We poll the wrong audience, at the wrong time, using the wrong kind of data, and we generalise from the wrong people.   What the evidence can and can't tell us With colleagues at Yale, I reviewed 50 recent, rigorous studies of collective climate action (open preprint). They covered protests, marches and divestment campaigns, drawn from sociology, psychology, political science and other fields. We sorted the findings by how strong the evidence was: Strong: activism shifts public opinion and media coverage in a pro-climate direction, though effects vary by context and tactic. Moderate: activism gets politicians talking about climate more, encourages pro-climate voting and puts financial pressure on carbon-intensive companies. Suggestive: activism affects emissions and environmental policy. The pattern is the problem. The evidence is strongest for outcomes close to the protest and weakest for the outcomes we care most about. That is not necessarily because activism fails at the distal end. Policy and emissions take years to move and have many causes, so they are hard to attribute. We also found little evidence that disruptive action reduced overall support for climate action, despite how often backlash is predicted. Social Change Lab's polling found the same for UK climate protests: disruptive actions didn't lead to a loss of public support for climate policies. The review has two big gaps. Most studies come from the US and Western Europe, and most measure short-term outcomes. So when someone says "the evidence shows protest works" or "the evidence shows it backfires", usually the evidence shows effects on attention and opinion, measured soon after, in rich democracies.   Measure 1: polling the wrong audience The most common test of a tactic is whether the public approves of it. With historian Kevin Young, I argued that majority support is the wrong metric. What matters more is whether a tactic imposes costs on the elite decision-makers who can concede. Take the case of the 1963 Birmingham civil rights campaign. It did not win by persuading the white public. Boycotts and sit-ins cost downtown businesses millions in sales, and those businesses pressed politicians to accept desegregation. From this, we argued that disruption should impose direct costs on elites, it must be sustained so they cannot wait it out, and it can take many forms, including boycotts, litigation and financial pressure. For climate, that points towards the banks, insurers and investors that fund fossil fuels. This is an argument from history and theory rather than an empirical test, and one case is not proof. The same applies to media coverage, the other thing activists check the morning after. With colleagues at Yale, Penn State and LSE, I analysed 412 articles about Extinction Rebellion and other groups. They came from the BBC and the 15 most-read UK papers, November 2022 to May 2023. We found: Who writes the story matters a lot. On a scale from −1 (negative) to 1 (positive), conservative papers covered climate actions 0.25 points more negatively than neutral outlets and 0.52 points more negatively than liberal ones. Tactics matter too. Legal actions were covered more favourably, and actions targeting industry got the most coverage. (Legal actions al