'If a fight starts, watch the crowd' The effect of violence on popular support for social movements (original) (raw)

Often, in otherwise nonviolent protest movements, some groups resort to violent actions such as street rioting. This article analyzes the impact that these violent episodes can have on popular support for social movements. To estimate the causal effect of violence, it exploits an unexpected riot outbreak during the fieldwork of a face-to-face survey in Barcelona. By comparing respondents interviewed before and after the riots, it finds that the street violence episode reduced support for the 15M or indignados movement in 12 percentage points on average. The magnitude of the effect is conditional on the respondents' predispositions towards the movement: it is smaller for core supporters, who are expected to share the frame of the movement in justifying violent actions, and larger for weak supporters, opposers and non-aligned citizens. Results are robust to different specifications and checks. These findings have potentially important implications for movements concerned with broadening their support base. Word count: 7,911