Perceiving Protest: How Publics View the Disruptiveness and Effectiveness of Protest

How do people evaluate social movement protest tactics? Theories covering public perceptions of protest emphasize that activists face a tactical dilemma, employing disruptive tactics to advance goals without alienating public support. Existing quantitative evidence on the perceived relationship between tactical disruptiveness and effectiveness, as well as how tactics are influenced by objective properties or subjective perceptions across social groups, remains limited. We address this gap through survey experiment data measuring U.S. voters’ paired-choice preferences across 66 tactics. Using Bradley-Terry models, we show that perceptions of disruptiveness and effectiveness are nonlinearly related, and their misalignment varies across different tactical dimensions. Additionally, results show that perceivers’ sociodemographic characteristics moderate the effects of tactical dimensions on protest perceptions. We find that social characteristics pattern views of effectiveness but not disruptiveness. Our research highlights the need to understand how perceptions of effective and disruptive protest are analytically distinct, shaped by tactical dimensions and the diverse publics perceiving them, and holds implications for how tactics may be perceived as legitimate.