Messaging strategies to inspire public support for the right to protest

Why this matters

Since 2022, three Acts of Parliament have substantially widened police powers over protest in England and Wales, and prison sentences for non-violent protest have become longer and more common. Yet there has been little public pushback. Support for protest in the UK is wide but thin: 83% agree that everyone should be able to protest on issues they care about, but 73% think protest rarely, if ever, makes a difference, and most people do not see it as something for them.

Communications about protest rights are currently dominated by defensive, rights-based messaging – slogans such as “Protest is not a crime”, images of arrests and protesters portrayed as victims. Until now, decisions about which framing works best have relied mainly on qualitative research and practitioner judgement. To our knowledge, this is the first experiment to test which messages move the UK public to act in defence of protest rights.

What we found

Participants read a short text using one of five framings – defensive rights (protest as a basic right under threat), injustice (enforcement as disproportionate or unfair), efficacy (protest as a tool that works, with concrete wins), universal threat (powers aimed at one cause can be turned on any cause) or corporate power (companies using the courts to shut down protest) – or an unrelated control text.

Efficacy framing had the largest effect on willingness to act, and was the only framing that also increased the number of people clicking through to sign a real petition or contact their MP. It appears to have worked mainly by raising people’s belief that protest can make a difference and their sense that the new laws could affect them personally; together these explain around 63% of its effect. Corporate power and universal threat framings also raised willingness to act.

The framing the sector leans on most performed worst. Defensive rights messaging did not make people any more willing to act than the control text, and produced fewer click-throughs than efficacy or injustice framing.

Attitudes and action did not move together. Every framing made people more supportive of protest rights than the control, with corporate power framing shifting attitudes towards the current restrictions most – mainly by making people angry. But efficacy framing, which did most for action, had the smallest effect on attitudes. The messages worked similarly for people across the political spectrum.

What it means for campaigners

• Show that protest works. Lead with concrete, preferably local, examples of ordinary people winning through protest – a hospital A&E kept open, a library saved – and connect them to how the new laws put that at risk.
• Move beyond defensive rights framing. Leading with the erosion of rights or the criminalisation of protest did least to move people to act. Campaigners can still talk about rights, but showing what protest achieves may be the best way to make the right feel real and worth defending.
• Use corporate power framing to shift views on the restrictions. It is a strong option for broad audiences, but works through anger, which is better at bringing people in than keeping them involved. Pairing it with efficacy framing, so that anger comes with a sense that things can change, is a promising approach that deserves testing.
• Decide whether you need to shift attitudes or mobilise action. With support for the principle already high, turning agreement into action is the bigger task – though opinion on the current restrictions remains divided.
• One message can work across audiences. Because the framings worked similarly whatever people’s politics, campaigners probably do not need separate scripts for left- and right-leaning audiences.

About the study

This was a pre-registered online randomised controlled trial with 3,493 UK adults recruited via Prolific and quota-sampled to national proportions on age, gender and political affiliation. Each framing was represented by more than 30 different texts so that the results reflect the framing rather than any one piece of wording. The effects are small in absolute terms, as is typical for message testing, but compare well with what such studies usually find: if a message like this reached one million people, a 2 percentage point increase would mean around 20,000 more people taking a first step to defend protest rights. This research was funded by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.