(Cross-posted from Political Fleshfeast)
Back in January 2003, over 4 years ago, some random blogger uncritically, and without any real evidence, accepted these statements from some random boviating blowhards.
True Confessions: war protesters bug me
Update: I know I criticized without offering an alternate solution. Quite frankly, I felt unable to offer one. Thankfully, Nathan Newman has.
And frankly, rallies are far less effective than people give them credit for. They make a nice media splash but given the work and time involved, a really poor use of resources. Think about it-- if 100,000 people (to take a conservative estimate) were down in DC this weekend, most of them taking the whole day to get there and get home, that is something like 1.2 million volunteer hours.
Instead of one media event that most people just barely notice in an impersonal newspaper article or TV message, if all of those people had spent that time in phone banks or door-knocking, they could have literally engaged tens of millions of people individually. They could have asked these new people to come to followup meetings, asked them to host house parties with neighbors, asked them to write their legislators-- asked them to do something other than stare at a media report.
Also, Eric Alterman tackles the issue:
But radical rhetoric denouncing America and everything it stands for - which is what I heard from the A.N.S.W.E.R.-chosen speakers in D.C. over the weekend - does more harm than good. They harden the other side's resolve and turn away "normal" non-political people from a cause they might otherwise support.
As it so happens:
Amplifying Public Opinion: (PDF)
The Policy Impact of the U.S. Environmental Movement
by Jon Agnone
University of Washington
Results
The results from multivariate Poisson regression models of the determinants of federal environmental laws from 1960-1998 are shown in Table 2.10
[Table 2: Poisson Regression Estimates of the Effects of Environmental Movement Protest Activity and
Public Opinion on Federal Environmental Legislation, 1960-1998]
Model 1 empirically tests the first hypothesis based on the dramatic events model: that protest will be positively related to the passage of pro-environmental policies. I find support for this hypothesis, with protest positively and significantly related to the passage of laws, controlling for other political factors. Based on the results of model 1, dramatic event theorists are correct to posit a direct relationship between protest and changes in public policy. Exponentiating the beta coefficients allows for decomposing the expected change in the dependent variable per each unit change in the independent variable, net of the other variables in the model. Accordingly, each protest event in a given year, net of the control variables, increases the likelihood of pro-environmental legislation being passed by 1.2% (e.012). Given the mean level across the time series, protest is on average associated with a 9.5% increase in the annual expected number of pro-environmental laws passed. These results are consistent with past work utilizing a dramatic events approach, and suggest that social movements can directly impact public policy when they employ dramatic events such as protests and demonstrations.
It appears that protests amplify opinion and increase the likelihood of the legislation they're aimed at of passing by about between 1 to 9 percent or so.
So I'd like to remind you all of the wise words of some random blogger:
Don't believe everything you read on the internets
Seriously, just because something online confirms your own viewpoint or prejudices or whatnot, it does not mean it's true.
Skepticism is a virtue.
Otherwise someone somewhere might end up laughing at you, and we can't have that now can we?