Hahrie Han’s detailed and careful review of my book, The Advantage of Disadvantage, raises several thought-provoking questions about when substantial policy change might occur and how to generate costly protest. I continue to contemplate these questions, but I will offer some insights.
First, Han expresses some dismay about elected officials’ (lack of) responsiveness to the 2017 Women’s March and 2020 Floyd protests. She asks how the value of any one [costly protest] signal might change as [protest] becomes more widespread than in my book’s empirical analyses, as it has done more recently. Indeed, more frequent protest suggests lower protest costs, perhaps due to shifts in the political environment or increases in issue salience. Nevertheless, even in an age of widespread protests, elected officials remain responsive to costly protest demands due to fears of potential electoral threats from constituents willing to participate until their salient grievances are met. On this point, my book’s concluding chapter discusses how integral persistent participation is for substantive policy change.
The concluding chapter discusses how many Ferguson protesters were upset with Representative William Lacy Clay, Jr., who represented the congressional district in which Ferguson protests ignited. They felt that Clay delivered only symbolic and insubstantial responses to the costly protest in his district, so they decided to hold him accountable electorally for his (lack of) responsiveness. Their first attempt in 2016 failed. But they persisted. In 2020, voters elected Ferguson activist Cory Bush to replace Clay as their U.S. House Representative. Holding Clay accountable and receiving substantive representation took longer than anticipated, but their sustained organizing and mobilizing resulted in the election of someone who shared and championed Ferguson protesters’ salient concerns.
Next, Han asks what the implications of The Advantage of Disadvantage are for protest leaders. Specifically, she asks: Is their only role to try to maximize the costliness of protest to strengthen the signal they send, or is there a role for strategic leadership and negotiation in translating the resources of the protest (risk, costly action, etc.) into legislative action? Certainly, a protest leader could read my book and infer that maximizing the costliness of protest is the best way to gain legislative responsiveness. However, this would miss a critical, though perhaps implicit, argument of the book.
Legislative responsiveness occurs following costly protest by low-resource groups because low-resource groups’ costly protest demonstrates a group’s ability to overcome collective action problems that inhibit protest mobilization and electoral threats when issue salience is low. Manufacturing costly protest to misrepresent issue salience may be productive in the short term. However, as Han’s co-authored book, Prisms of the People, stresses, one of the most effective ways to hold an elected official accountable to a group is for that group to be organized such that it can re-mobilize when grievances are ignored. Manufacturing costly protest is less likely to communicate a credible electoral threat.
Given the scholarship of Han and others, which compellingly focus on the how of collective action, I was inspired to focus more on when collective action might yield at least marginal policy outcomes for groups consistently marginalized in U.S. politics. Costly protest is not always successful in producing substantive policy change. But The Advantage of Disadvantage contends that groups with salient interests who engage in costly protest and can hold legislators accountable electorally can receive support for their protest demands.
