Did Black Lives Matter Protests Change Public Opinion?
| Published date | 01 November 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X231175625 |
| Author | Frederick J. Boehmke,Samuel M. Avery,Marissa S. Good,Thomas C. Dainty,Hyein Ko |
| Date | 01 November 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
American Politics Research
2023, Vol. 51(6) 683–700
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1532673X231175625
journals.sagepub.com/home/apr
Did Black Lives Matter Protests Change Public
Opinion?
Frederick J. Boehmke
1
, Samuel M. Avery
1
, Marissa S. Good
1
,
Thomas C. Dainty
1
, and Hyein Ko
1
Abstract
Protest events affect public opinion on the issue of interest. However, the extent to which an individual’s proximity to prote sts
impacts public opinion is less examined. Does a protest event occurring nearby, i.e., within an individual’s neighborho od, impact
their opinion? Do protests that happen further away, perhaps in the next county, have the same impact on public opinion? This
study analyzes the impact of exposure to protests by focusing on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in 2020 using public
opinion data from Iowa merged with protest locations in Iowa. Specifically, we examine public support for BLM and for
defunding the police. We evaluate the role of distance through a discrete mileage cut-off and a distance decay function. Our
analysis shows that people living closer to protests show greater support for the BLM movement in gene ral and, to a less extent,
for defunding the police. The results suggest that protests may affect public opinion, but only within a very narrow range of a few
miles.
Keywords
Black Lives Matter, protests, public opinion, spatial proximity
Introduction
On May 25th of 2020, George Floyd, a Black man, was
murdered by an officer who kneeled on his neck for over
8 minutes. This sparked outrage across the country and a
revival of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the
media. From May 26 to August 22 of 2020, nearly eight
thousand protests occurred in support of BLM with an es-
timated 15–26 million participants, making it one of the
largest movements in the history of the United States. The
BLM movement focuses on the unjust violence inflicted on
Black people and communities, with a primary focus on
police brutality. The organization originally began in 2013 in
response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer and
has grown since. The number of Black people killed by police
in the U.S. is extremely high, with an estimated 241 killings
in 2020 alone (Statista, 2022).
BLM protestors called for justice in 2020 by bringing up
the previous murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and
Freddie Gray as well as more recent Black civilian killings
including Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor,and Jacob Blake.
This movement garnered significant attention in 2020 and led
to nationwide conversations about criminal justice reform.
While the media focused on the few violent occurrences
around BLM protests, the large majority (94%) of these
protests were considered peaceful according to the Armed
Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) data
(Raleigh et al., 2010). This significant movement was even
able to ignite policy change such as the decision for some
police departments to ban chokeholds and reallocate funds.
While previous studies have shown that protests have an
impact on public opinion (Feinberg et al., 2020;Huff &
Kruszewska, 2016;Metcalfe & Pickett, 2022), it is still
uncertain whether BLM protest activities shaped public
opinion toward the movement itself or on its signature issues.
For instance, during a 2017 pipeline protest in North Dakota,
Rep. Keith Kempenich said that the “protest was located 40
miles from any population center, so demonstrators were not
going to get any attention unless they took dramatic action”
(Jackman, 2017). Although this example comes from a
separate movement, it clearly raises the question of how
distance from protest events may influence their possible
effect on public opinion. With thousands of protests occurring
all across the United States starting in the summer of 2020,
the BLM movement provides an excellent opportunity to
evaluate this question.
1
The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Hyein Ko, The University of Iowa, 341 Schaeffer Hall, Iowa City 52242, IA,
USA.
Email: hyein-ko@uiowa.edu
The present study seeks to answer this question by con-
sidering the importance of the proximity of protests to in-
dividual opinion. Not all protest events are equally influential
or important to the public. As previous studies on different
policy areas or political events have discussed, closer events
matter more than distant ones because they provide more
opportunities to have direct experience, to obtain contextual
information, and to increase familiarity with the topic. In
addition, closer events can modulate how the public perceives
information and have different consequences than more
distant events. Protests, as one type of political event, will
have some effects on the public based on how close or far the
venues are from individuals.
To be specific, we examine the proximity of BLM protests
to individuals and whether exposure to greater protest activity
affects their opinion about the BLM movement and its goals.
We use data from a survey of public opinion in Iowa and
merge it with data from ACLED on protests occurring in
Iowa. In terms of public opinion we use measures of public
support for BLM and for defunding the police. We consider
two measures of respondents’proximity to protests: one that
counts the number of protests occurring with a certain dis-
tance and a second that uses a distance decay function to
weight closer protests more than distant ones. By comparing
different distances and decay rates, we are able to get a more
precise sense of how close is close enough to matter for public
opinion. Our results match Rep. Kempenich’s observation
that protests within a narrow range of just a few miles affect
opinion, with stronger effects for opinion on the BLM
movement than for defunding the police, whereas those
further away have little effect.
Spatial Proximity and Public Opinion
Distance Effects on Public Opinion in General
The importance of spatial context is encapsulated in Tobler’s
the first law of geography: “everything is related to every-
thing else, but near things are more related than distant things
(Tobler, 1970, p. 236).”Stated differently, closer subjects
(e.g., political events, political agenda, or even politicians)
are likely to have more influence than distant ones. While
there are many ways to define the closeness, the current study
will focus on physical distance and examine how physical
proximity influences public opinion.
Previous studies have shown that spatial proximity to the
item of interest matters (Boudet et al., 2018;Pulido et al.,
2019). For instance, Branton et al. (2007) examined how
voting behavior on nativist California ballot initiatives was
affected by voters’proximity to the US-Mexico border and
find evidence that proximity to the border influences voting
behavior, although the impact varies by partisanship.
Boehmke et al. (2012) examined Indian gaming initiatives in
California and found that spatial context and exposure to
existing Indian gaming operations and Indian reservations
affect how people voted on three ballot initiatives that sought
to expand gaming opportunities for Indian nations.
The importance of spatial proximity on public opinion has
buttressed other political topics as well. Cortina (2020), for
example, found that closer distance to the US-Mexico border
influences Republicans’support for border wall construction.
Examining American public opinion toward the military
force abroad, Russett and Nincic (1976) found that people are
more willing to militarily assist countries that are closer to the
border. As highlighted by these studies covering a wide range
of policy areas, incorporating the role of spatial context is
important for understanding public opinion.
These studies take a couple of approaches to linking
proximity to attitudes or behavior. To begin with, spatial
distance has an impact on familiarity with the issue. People
who live closer to the item(s) of interest, whether an inter-
national border or a casino, are more likely to encounter
information related to the issue because they can be easily
exposed to local media coverage due to the potential higher
volume of articles or broadcasting (Branton & Dunaway,
2009).
The physical proximity could further allow individuals to
obtain information by direct observation or experience
(Cortina, 2020). In contrast, physical distance will hamper
direct information acquisition and the ability to link infor-
mation to the actual context; greater distance could even
provide different information than is that obtained closer in
(Branton et al., 2007). Regardless of the issue, therefore,
residents of the area or residents of nearby areas have more
chances to acquire specific information and be familiar with
the item of interests.
Spatial proximity also affects information processing.
Based on the collected information, individuals evaluate
potential costs and benefits and modulate their opinion to-
ward the issue of interest, with the spatial distance working as
a weight in this calculation. For instance, with Not In My
Back Yard (NIMBY) policies such as building hazardous
facilities, people who live closer to the venue will place more
weight on the potential cost; on the contrary, individuals who
live substantially further away will consider more of the
potential benefits if they are broader than the localized costs
(Boehmke et al., 2012). While the specific policy context will
decide the relative size of a distance-weighted effect, prox-
imity to the item of interest is a key element of individuals’
information process. Distance, in turn, will have therefore
have an impact on their evaluation toward the issue.
Third, spatial contiguity is closely related to the degree of
consequences. Policy or political events have spillover ef-
fects, whether positive or negative. For example, building
hospital infrastructure in a region will create more jobs; it
will, in turn, improve economic conditions not only in that
region but also in nearby areas. These positive spillovers,
however, will be diminished as distance increases. With the
case of hazardous facilities, for example, negative spillovers
will decrease in more distant areas. Even when the issue of
684 American Politics Research 51(6)
To continue reading
Request your trial