Extreme Protest Tactics Reduce Support for the Climate Movement and Climate Mitigation Policies

In response to the escalating climate crisis, and with major climate policy reforms under debate across Europe, many environmental activists have turned to extreme protest tactics, such as vandalizing museums and obstructing major highways. Research suggests that extreme protest tactics - protest behaviors perceived to be highly disruptive, harmful to others, or both - may attract media attention, but typically reduce public support for protest groups (e.g., Feinberg et al., 2020). However, this research has focused primarily on Americans’ responses to public protest. Additionally, little experimental research has tested the causal effects of extreme tactics in the context of the climate movement, even though it is the largest social movement in the world (Hasegawa, 2022). To address these gaps, we fielded a large, pre-registered online survey experiment, conducted on a representative sample of French citizens (n = 8,001), testing the effects of exposure to four protest actions featuring different degrees of extremity - a peaceful march, occupying an office building, blocking public transportation, and damaging infrastructure. Results showed that, relative to a control condition, extreme protest actions reduced support for the activist group, willingness to join the climate movement, and support for climate mitigation policies (e.g., a carbon tax on fossil fuel companies), with these reductions increasing proportional to the extremity of the protest actions. Additionally, we found no evidence that exposure to these extreme tactics led to greater support for a more moderate climate protest group, offering evidence against the “radical flank effect” found in previous research (Simpson et al., 2022). Overall, results show that previously demonstrated negative effects of extreme protest tactics on popular support for social movements and their policy goals extends to activism on climate change, and also generalizes beyond the U.S. to the European context, a critical setting for policy efforts to address climate change.