Protests, Political

Political protest refers to various means of influencing the political process that typically fall outside of the more traditional means such as voting for elected officials and running for office. These actions do not always involve fringe groups or individuals and can emerge instead from within the establishment. Further, protest activities are instrumental to social movements as a way to affect change, recruit members, share messages, and reach broader publics through mass media coverage. Protest acts can take many forms, including speeches, marches, rallies, letter-writing campaigns, sit-ins, and demonstrations, among other actions. As a result of this variation, research on political protest has explored a wide range of groups, activities, issues, and causes. Scholars have particularly focused on the key role communication processes can play in the success and functioning of protest activities at many levels, including through interpersonal connections among members, the communication artifacts and rhetorical strategies used by social movements, and coverage of protest acts by news media.

Much of the scholarship on what factors predict whether individuals will engage in protest-related activity has been categorized under the “social movements” label. This literature suggests the importance of an individual's connections to other people and [Page 663]how those connections influence the individual's decision to participate in protest activities and join protest groups. The influence of others takes two main forms. First, social network research indicates that having network ties to protestors and protest groups are important, such that those with more social network ties to protestors are more likely to engage in protest activity than those who have few ties to protesters. Second, work by Pamela Oliver and others on critical mass indicates that individuals take into account the number of other individuals participating in a protest action or social movement when making their own decision to participate. Specifically, each individual has a threshold for the number of people that need to be involved in order to feel comfortable participating themselves. If there are not enough other people involved, the individual will not participate.

Protesters, including Cindy Sheehan (center), march down 15th Street during the "10,000 Mother of a March" rally May 14, 2007, in Washington, D.C. Hundreds of antiwar protesters marched from Lafayette Park across from the White House to the U.S. Capitol, staging a sit-in and blocking traffic on Independence Avenue for more than 30 minutes.

Source: Getty Images.

Apart from individual protesters, interpretations of the meaning and success of a protest event are based on the rhetorical strategies and tactics employed by a movement. The symbolic actions—speeches, marches, slogans, signs, chants, clothing, and so on—that different protest groups employ have provided a rich source for scholars studying the rhetoric of social movements, and each contributes to how a group or event is interpreted. As such, the rhetorical scholar studying social movements would only consider the protest event as one small piece of the symbolic meaning of a social movement. Considerable debate within the field has also centered on how to best characterize and study the rhetoric of social movements. Morris and Brown's collection of readings tracks the theoretical development and debates within this area of research as well as highlighting scholarly work on key political movements. Such work highlights a shift in focus toward application and testing of rhetorical theory by conducting case studies on key political movements such as the American Indian movement, the Black Power movement, and the feminist movement, among others.

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