Michael Jacobs

Michael Jacobs

Political Science Post-doctorate

Research

Ongoing Work

Improving the Quality of Online Public Discourse

I am currently a post doc at ETH Zurich working on a SNSF funded project, which aims to improve the quality of online public discourse (Principal Investigators: Dominik Hangartner, Gloria Gennaro, Fabrizio Gilardi, Karsten Donnay). As part of this, I am developing online field experiments to audit existing content moderation systems and test new ways of designing social media environments to promote constructive over toxic and polarising speech.

Papers

Breaking into the Public Sphere: How Protest Tactics Shape Media Visibility

Forthcoming at British Journal of Political Science

Abstract Getting heard is a crucial first step for protesters to influence policy and public opinion. How can protest organisers boost their coverage in the media? This study provides new evidence on this question, based on a decade of UK environmental and economic protests from 2010 to 2020 (N=1,708). Relying on protest groups’ social media streams as trace data, I introduce a computer-assisted method for constructing a media-independent protest event dataset. Using a ‘within group’ design, I provide a sharper test of the causal effects of tactical choices compared to previous studies. I find that confrontational elements, such as disruption and arrests, are the strongest predictors, more than doubling the expected magnitude of coverage. I also find that right-leaning (ideologically unsympathetic) outlets are more responsive to confrontational elements than left-leaning (ideologically sympathetic) outlets, which suggests that disruptive tactics affect the composition as well as the size of a protest’s audience.

Do Unpopular Tactics Undermine the Persuasiveness of Protest?

Conditionally accepted at American Review of Political Science

Abstract To attract attention, protesters sometimes resort to the use of disruptive or even violent tactics. To what extent do such tactics undermine the persuasiveness of the group’s message? This study uses a factorial vignette survey experiment of 4,087 UK adults to decompose variation in protest tactics into multiple dimensions (legality, scope, disruption, violence) and examine their effects on the perceived acceptability and persuasiveness of protest across three issues and twelve protest demands. Using a quasi-prepost design, I test whether protests are persuasive, ineffective or dissuasive relative to a ‘no protest’ counterfactual. I find that while more extreme tactics dampen persuasive effects, they tend not to result in dissuasion, even for the most extreme tactics analysed (property damage). There is also no evidence of policy belief polarisation, despite a high correlation between ex-ante support and approval of protesters’ tactics. These results speak directly to contemporary debates over strategic choices facing protesters.

Do Protests Shift Public Discourse in Activists’ Preferred Direction? Evidence from a Decade of UK Environmental Protests

Under review at American Journal of Political Science

Abstract A large literature recognises the reliance of protest movements on media coverage to diffuse their message. Yet, few empirical studies have looked beyond direct coverage of protest events to explore how protests shape the wider public discourse about their issue. Does initial coverage of a protest tend to trigger favourable changes in public discourse from the protesters’ perspective? Using computational methods, I analyse the discursive effects of a decade of environmental protests in the UK, drawing on a corpus of around 1m tweets by protest organisers and over 130,000 news articles. The results indicate that while protests are able to boost the volume of relevant discourse, they are less effective at shifting the polarity of the discourse in their preferred direction. Contrary to expectations, I find no evidence of significantly worse outcomes for disruptive compared to non-disruptive protests. Taken together, these findings have important implications for strategic choices facing protesters.