Research project The power of protest?

Does protest influence environmental policy? Earlier protest research is inconclusive on protest’s legislative impact, but recently, clear evidence on legislative agenda-setting and beyond have emerged from more advanced data-intense analyses. In this light, we investigate protest-policy relationships over a forty-year period in Sweden using new data and an innovative design. The project contributes by: (1) developing models of protest influence on legislative agenda-setting and movement of legislation through successive policy stages in a corporatist political system, (2) accounting for rarely studied regional level processes and protest “failures” in which protest and policy change are observed in absence of each other, and (3) using new, original, and comprehensive data on protest actions throughout Sweden from 1980 to 2020. Results are expected to revitalize debates about the role of protest in functioning democracies.