Nonviolent Protests Favor Majorities, Not Minorities

Insights from the Field

Ethnic identity

Nonviolence

Experiments

Protests

Policing

Effective for Whom? Ethnic Identity and Nonviolent Resistance was authored by Tamar Mitts and Devorah Manekin. It was published by Cambridge in APSR in 2022.

Nonviolent tactics are often credited with greater political success than violent tactics, but that pattern hides a powerful moderating factor: ethnic identity. Negative stereotypes that link minority groups with violence lead observers to view minority-led nonviolent campaigns as more violent, increase support for repression, and undermine those campaigns’ chances of success.

📊 Cross-National Pattern

Cross-national evidence shows that the advantage of nonviolence depends on the ethnicity of campaigners. Key finding:

The positive effect of nonviolent tactics on campaign outcomes is significantly moderated by ethnicity: nonviolence increases success only for dominant (majority) groups, not for minority groups.

🧪 Testing How People Perceive Protests

Two experiments in the United States and Israel probe the psychological mechanisms behind the cross-national pattern:

Study 1 (United States and Israel): Identical descriptions of nonviolent resistance were judged differently depending on the protesters’ ethnicity. Nonviolent resistance by ethnic minorities was perceived as more violent and as requiring more policing than the same tactics by majority groups.
Study 2 (U.S., leveraging June 2020 protests): Using the wave of racial justice protests in June 2020, the study replicated and extended the first finding. White participants were perceived as less violent than Black participants when protesting for the same goals.

🔑 Key Findings

Ethnic identity shapes perceptions: minority groups are more likely to be seen as violent even when they use nonviolent tactics.
Those perceptions increase public support for repression and reduce the effectiveness of nonviolent campaigns among minorities.
The empirical pattern holds across cross-national data and experimental tests in two national contexts.

💡 Why It Matters

These results highlight that the advantage of nonviolence is conditional on who is protesting. Widespread biases tied to ethnic identity create additional obstacles for nonviolent mobilization by minority groups, with implications for scholarship on social movements, public opinion, and policy responses to protest.