Does Protest Influence Political Speech? Evidence from UK Climate Protest, 2017–2019

• Published in: British journal of political science 2024-04, Vol.54 (2), p.456-473
• Main Authors: Barrie, Christopher, Fleming, Thomas G., Rowan, Sam S.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Climate change; Communication; Crowdsourcing; Data; Demonstrations & protests; Influence; Legislators; Members of Parliament; Political advertising; Political communication; Public opinion; Speech; Speeches; The British Academy Brian Barry Prize Essay; Voter behavior; Voters
• ISSN: 0007-1234; 1469-2112
• DOI: 10.1017/S0007123423000376

How does protest affect political speech? Protest is an important form of political claim-making, yet our understanding of its influence on how individual legislators communicate remains limited. Our paper thus extends a theoretical framework on protests as information about voter preferences, and evaluates it using crowd-sourced protest data from the 2017–2019 Fridays for Future protests in the UK. We combine these data with ~2.4m tweets from 553 legislators over this period and text data from ~150k parliamentary speech records. We find that local protests prompted MPs to speak more about the climate, but only online. These results demonstrate that protest can shape the timing and substance of political communication by individual elected representatives. They also highlight an important difference between legislators' offline and online speech, suggesting that more work is needed to understand how political strategies differ across these arenas.