Why do people protest?

Why do people protest?  This is an issue that I have been pondering from a practical and a theoretical level for some time.  I go to South Africa once or twice a year and each time I go the level of protest seems higher than my previous visit.  Recent protests have made parts of the country almost ungovernable.  From observing these patterns, I began to wonder why people protest about a certain issue.

If you ask people in South Africa who are familiar with the protests or active in them, they will tell you that people are protesting because they are angry about the government’s lack of performance on various economic issues, such as services like water and electricity, jobs, and housing.  However, this can’t be correct.  In the first place, the Government of South Africa has been reasonably responsive to these demands.  While the poor do not live well in South Africa, the government does provide free basic electricity and water, it has built millions of new homes, and has reasonable social welfare policies for a country at its level of development.  In addition, public opinion data demonstrates that South Africans are reasonably content with their existing government.  Moreover, levels of satisfaction are similar to those of a much poorer but equally as democratic country – Ghana – where protests are extremely rare.

More broadly, the argument that people protest because they reflect the public mood about important issues doesn’t hold.  Consider three current protests:

1. US: Against health care reform
2. UK: Climate change
3. South Africa: Better services, jobs, and housing

There is a curious pattern to these protests that suggests it is about far more than about anger over broad public concerns.  In the UK and the US, protests are not focused on issues that most people cite as a major issue.  Moreover, as far as I know there have been no widespread protests around jobs and the economy in either country.  Rather, people are mobilizing around more marginal concerns from the point of view of society in general.  In South Africa, public opinion data do not suggest widespread dissatisfaction around the topics of the protests: half the population say the government is managing the economy well or fairly well, 42% say it is doing a good job raising standards of the poor, and 50% trust the ruling African National Congress (ANC).  While no government would be proud of these ratings, they don’t seem to be as low as the massive amounts of protest would suggest.

Having dispensed with the argument that protests occur around citizens’ most salient concerns, what is a more reasonable way to figuring our why people protest around an issue?  Most important, we need to recognize that the level of protest we observe is a very small fraction of the potential amount.  After all, in every society there is always going to some group of people who are going to be angry about some issue.  Thus, most of the time, we observe only a very small amount of protest relative to the potential set of areas where protest could occur.  In trying to understand why we see protest in the areas we do, this strikes me as the most fundamental point.

I suggest that the reason we only see a small amount of protest relative to the amount that could exist is because protest is subject to a massive collective action problem.  The costs for an individual to mobilize a population are typically far greater than the benefits he or she can expect from any policy changes that derive from protesting.  For example, if your main concern is about the employment situation in your country, while you may benefit from policy changes that create more jobs, it is in your individual interest to work hard at your existing job to keep it or look for a job if you do not have one, not protest.  As a result, most protests won’t occur because most people will not find it in their self-interest to organize one.  Mobilizing people requires time, ability, and incentive.  Thus, only those who have the time, skills, and incentive to organize (e.g., people who care a lot about the issue or stand to gain/lose substantially from any policy changes) will do so.  Thus, we come to the first implication about protest: it will reflect the priorities of those who organize them.  These may or may not be the most exigent concerns of the society.  The problem does not end there, however.  Even after you have mobilized the population, you still need to create a window of opportunity to protest.  There seem to be two ways this can occur.  One, an event occurs that creates a window of opportunity (such as the Obama Administration getting serious about health care reform).  Two, you care so passionately about the issue that you make your own window (as this article on climate change protest in the UK seems to suggest).

From the above, we can hypothesize that protest around an issue will occur when those who have the incentive and ability to do so find or create the opportunity.  I think this does a nice job of explaining why we see the protests that we do.  In the US, a small number of large insurance firms stand to lose a lot of money if the government provides health care.  The insurance firms have solved their collective action problem because each one has a strong incentive to organize even if others do not because of the amount of money it could lose.  When the Obama Administration showed it was serious, the window of opportunity materialized.  Hence we observe protest against health care reform.  In the UK, the people protesting appear to enjoy it.  They have solved their collective action problem and created their window of opportunity because they derive benefits from the act of protesting.  In South Africa we see significant amounts of protest at the local level due to the fight against apartheid.  Like today, during apartheid there were massive protests at the local level on economic issues like housing and jobs, and those who participated wrote a lot about it.  South African organizers at the local level today can easily solve their collective action problem and create their window of opportunity because they have widespread access to strategies that worked well in the past in their country on the issues around which they are mobilizing.

Protest in South Africa

For a while I have been interested in the violent protests that are a daily occurrence in South Africa.  The subject has caught my attention not only because of their frequency, but also because of the targets and methods protestors employ, for example killing elected officials.  When I was in South Africa a few weeks ago, municipal employees protested by dumping garbage in the street and vandalizing government property.  These demonstrations fascinated me because government employees protested by creating unpleasant work for themselves when they returned to their job.

Today’s protests top the ones I have mentioned above.  In Pretoria, South Africa’s capital, approximately 1500 to 2000 members of the South Africa National Defense Force held an illegal march, destroying government and private property.  The most interesting part for me was the standoff between the police and the soldiers:

The protest turned violent when marchers arriving at the Union Buildings [the office of the President] were not allowed access to the property. According to media reports, police fired rubber bullets at protesters who refused to disperse after handing over a memorandum of grievances.

You know you have a serious governance problem when the police fire rubber bullets at soldiers who are protesting illegally and violently.