Who <em>Really</em> Protests, and Why?

In 2020, two major protest movements defined our political landscape: the racial-justice protests after the murder of George Floyd and the anti-lockdown protests pushing against COVID-19 restrictions.

At the time, these movements were seen by many as near-polar opposites and were often defined by their extremes. For the police-brutality protests, images of Minneapolis on fire and demands for total police abolition seemed to define the movement. For the anti-lockdown protests, militiamen with firearms in and around state capitols were among the most striking visuals. And an association with fringe right-wing groups marred the public-health protests with a sense of extremism.

But research from economist Nick Papageorge complicates these findings. Along with his co-authors, Papageorge ran surveys in the summer of 2020 that captured demographic and ideological information about the people who participated in these movements. Much to Papageorge’s surprise, his findings revealed significant overlap between the BLM and anti-lockdown protest movements. And—on some metrics—the paper reveals that the protesters were not out of touch with the majority of Americans. Rather, they were more representative of the country than even the 2020 electorate.

In this episode of Good on Paper, I speak with Papageorge, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who largely works at the intersection of public health and economics.

“There has been this notion of, Maybe it’s just fun. Protesting is the new brunch was one of the things that came out,” Papageorge said. “And I think that was one part of the caricaturization, right? That there are these gun-toting vigilantes protesting. And then there were these privileged leftist extremists going to these BLM protests. And that just wasn’t in line with what we were finding. The median protester was not an extremist.”

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: This is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

I’m your host, Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer here at The Atlantic, where much of my written work begins with seeing a new working paper come out and following it down a research rabbit hole.

An exciting, new finding is always great, but the most important work is figuring out how it sits in the context of the rest of our knowledge base. What is it adding? Where does it depart from consensus?

And particularly when we’re talking about new findings in economics—those often come from early versions of papers, before all the levels of review have been completed, so there’s an extra, added level of scrutiny you have to have.

There’s one such paper that’s been stuck in my brain since I first saw it come into my inbox more than two years ago—one that upended much of my thinking around the protests in 2020.

The paper is called, “Who Protests, What Do They Protest, and Why?” and it focuses on the demographic and ideological characteristics of protesters in two major social movements: The BLM protests following the murder of George Floyd and the anti-lockdown protests that came in response to restrictive COVID-19 rules.

The paper finds that nearly 30 percent of protesters attended both a BLM and a lockdown protest, indicating significant overlap in the types of people attracted to both movements—and the research shows that these people are protestors, not counterprotesters. This finding really surprised me and made me question my priors about what kinds of people were attracted to these movements.

Now, it’s not possible to talk about protests without thinking about those that rocked college campuses this year. While this conversation doesn’t touch on those protests, because we taped it in the spring, the research still has some lessons in it for those drawing large conclusions about who’s protesting and why, and whether contemporaneous media reports can give us an accurate picture of chaotic events.

The stakes of misunderstanding the composition of protesters are high: Who we think is protesting drives how we respond to them. Who we think make up