Person:

McKenna, Liz

Mass protest has reached record levels, yet the movements producing it have rarely been weaker. Why does so much participation leave so little behind? Most explanations center on recruitment, while retention has received far less attention. Drawing on a year of participation records from 20 organizations across 11 states, paired with prospective interviews and fieldwork, I observe 91,648 attendances by 38,740 people who took civic action beyond voting. I find that 71 percent of these participants act once and do not return within the observation window. Among those whose first participation was a mass mobilization, attrition approaches 90 percent. Across all groups, however, similarly sized events resulted in very different retention rates. I call the capacity behind these differences catchment and trace it to organizational practice. A first event where most of those present are established members raises the probability of return within 90 days by 12.8 percentage points, net of event size and robust to organization-clustered inference. The pattern holds across constituencies and regions, and in 13 years of records from one organization. The strongest organizational correlate of catchment is the share of members embedded in teams.

Modern political campaigns decide who to contact using turnout-propensity scores. Practitioners have long argued that these scores “redline” low-scored communities, which campaigns rarely attempt to reach. I examine this claim using person-level records of Democratic campaigns and community-based organizations’ 414 million contact attempts (aimed at 14 million voters in ten battleground states in 2024), matched to validated turnout. Three of every five attempts—and two of every three successful conversations—went to voters already scored likely to vote. Nearly a third of the registered voters in this universe (3.8 million) did not cast a ballot, and 1.43 million of them were never reached by any program. These patterns suggest a self-fulfilling prophecy: low-scored voters go uncontacted, and the abstention that follows becomes the record from which their next score is estimated. Local membership-based community organizations offer one promising response to this dynamic. In 2024, these groups’ contact attempts succeeded at roughly twice Democratic campaigns’ rate among Black, Hispanic, Native American, young, new-registrant, and low-income voters. Each additional conversation is associated with a turnout gain, and the association is larger among voters scored less likely to vote.

Protests constitute a primary way that members of the public express their preferences. Focusing on policy protests in the United States, we use a survey experiment to study how the race of the protesters affects public reactions. We find that relative to white nonviolent protests, Black non-violent protests are perceived as more violent, but that does not dampen individuals’ likelihood of joining the protests. Moreover, Black nonviolent protests, but not white nonviolent protests, significantly move opinion in the direction advocated by the protest. All of the race effects, though, cease to exist when protests are violent. We replicate the results with samples of citizens with connections to civic organizations and elected officials. The findings suggest that the effect of race on protest reactions is conditional, depending on the protest’s goals (e.g., alter perceptions, impact policy) and tactics (nonviolent, violent).

Digital tools now enable crowds to assemble without formal organization, but their long-term impact is understudied. Drawing on 397 events and 15 months of fieldwork, this study compares the two poles of an organizational continuum during Brazil's 2013--2016 protest cycle: leaderless online-to-offline protests, and those convoked by unions and other formal movement associations. I code the main challenger groups on organizational vitality, leadership trajectories, electoral articulation, and policy durability (OLEP) five and ten years past the peak, a longitudinal complement to WUNC, Tilly's contemporaneous measures of protest strength. The two poles scored similarly on worthiness and numbers, differed on commitment and unity, and digital origins shaped but did not determine outcomes. Across left- and right-wing formations, protest groups that invested in membership structures converted mobilization into political influence. The labor federations atrophied, and many once-prominent groups dissolved. I explain these dissolutions as a consequence of means--ends decoupling---activity that proceeds without producing the outcomes it is meant to serve. Digital decoupling specifies the mechanism under technological mediation: action multiplies, while the capacities that produce intended outcomes do not. Mistaking protest activity for the movements it once indexed helps explain a decade of mass mobilization that produced little durable change.