How do protests shape incumbent support in lower-income democracies? An unexpected anti-government demonstration in Ghana that intersected a planned field survey provides a natural experiment to answer this question.
📋 Natural Experiment: Survey Interrupted by an Anti-Government Demonstration
- An anti-government protest in Ghana unexpectedly occurred while an original field survey was in progress, creating a comparison between respondents interviewed immediately before and immediately after the event.
- The research design leverages this timing to estimate the protest’s causal effect on attitudes toward the President, with attention to potential confounders.
🔎 What the Data Show: Immediate Rallying Among Supporters
- Respondents interviewed immediately after the protest are more trusting of, and more approving of, the President than those interviewed before the protest.
- The effect is concentrated among individuals who voted for the ruling party in the previous election; it has little to no effect on opposition voters, whose strongly negative prior beliefs remain unchanged.
- The result is robust across multiple bandwidths, specifications, and placebo tests.
⚖️ Why This Pattern Occurs: Social Identity and Group Threat
- Findings are consistent with social identity and group threat theories: supporters of an unpopular administration rally to defend their in-group when it faces public challenge.
- The protest polarizes opinions along pre-existing partisan lines rather than persuading opponents.
🌍 Why It Matters: Protests Can Backfire for Protesters, Boost Incumbents
- Anti-government demonstrations can sometimes bolster incumbent support rather than undermine it, extending scholarship on partisanship and identity politics to an understudied, lower-income democratic context.
- The results highlight that protest effects depend on audience composition and existing partisan attachments, with implications for interpreting protest outcomes in comparable democracies.
