When Do Protests Actually Work? — with Erica Chenoweth

0:02Scott Galloway:Episode 391. 391 Broadway is a historic building located in New York City. True story. When I first moved to New York, my best friend Lee introduced me to a bunch of Broadway dancers, and I dated a Rockette, and I went to meet her in Chicago when she was on tour for the Christmas Spectacular. I came into her room where there was a little person cutting lines on the ass of a answer. True story. No joke. True story. Go, go, go.

0:40Scott Galloway:Welcome to the 391st episode of the Prof G pod. Didn't see that coming, did you? Didn't see that coming. What's happening in today's episode, we speak with Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist and professor at Harvard's Kennedy School, whose research focuses on political violence, civil resistance, and social movements. Professor Chenoweth is widely known for their work on the effectiveness of nonviolent protests, something we've spoken a lot about. We've even quoted their work many times in our newsletter, No Mercy No Mouth, specifically on the topic of resist and unsubscribe. Anyways, with that, here's our conversation with Erica Chenoweth.

1:23Scott Galloway:Professor, where does this podcast find you? I'm in Cambridge today. All right, let's bust right into it. You spent your career studying how nonviolent movements succeed or fail, and we've cited your work in our newsletter several times. We even launched our own economic resistance campaign earlier this year. But I want to make sure, well, I'd love just your insight. How would you describe what your research actually says in your own words? I think the most relevant research here is about what is it that makes movements more likely to succeed or fail. And I think the sort of synthesis I would offer from a huge range of research studies on this, my own and others, is that there are really four things that make movements more likely to succeed than others.

2:08The first is very large and diverse participation that builds momentum. The second is the ability to leverage that participation into creating defections within the opponent's pillars of support, whether those are the sort of political institutions, the social and cultural institutions, security forces, the business and economic elite that uphold, you know, a sort of authoritarian status quo, if you will. The third is the ability to shift between methods of protest to methods of non-cooperation, like your campaign, and methods of alternative institutions or building mutual aid networks and things along those lines.

2:48And then the fourth is the ability to maintain resilience and discipline, even as repression against the movement escalates. And the movements that do those things well tend to succeed more often than the movements that struggle with one or more of those four factors.

3:04Scott Galloway:Where do you think most movements get it wrong? Because my sense is becoming just a sophomore student in this recently and listening to you and Timothy Snyder and some other people is that the vast majority fail. Which of the four hurdles do you think trips people up most often? I think getting defections is the hardest. In a study that I did with Zoe Marks and Andrew Hawking, we did a sort of computational study that ran three different types of strategies. The first is the mass mobilization strategy, just get as many people in the streets as possible as quickly as possible and hope for the best with regard to pillars defecting.

3:44The second strategy was what we called a naive pillar strategy, which is, you know, protest in a way that's trying to get those defections, but you don't know in advance which pillars are most likely to defect. You just go to the nearest one and protest and hope for the best. And then the third strategy is what we call an informed pillar strategy. and that's where the activists have some advanced information about which of the pillars are already kind of on the fence and they focus on those first. And that then creates early defections in the movement that can create a cascade of defections. And that third strategy is by far the most likely to succeed in the least amount of time.

4:23And the first strategy, the mass mobilization strategy, is to get as many people into the streets as possible, as quickly as possible, and hope that the pillars defect is the least likely to succeed. And so I think part of it is just, it's actually very challenging, both to build a strategy that creates defections and to understand, you know, how to do that in a way that creates the cascade of defections, not just an occasional defection here or there because they happen to, you know, push the right button one day.

4:54Scott Galloway:So using those four criteria, evaluate the No Kings protests. Yeah, so I mean, my sense is that the No Kings protests, and by this, let's just talk about the national days of protest, right? Which is not all that it is, but the protests themselves. I mean, we are seeing growth in numbers over time. We're seeing a diverse range of people from all walks of life coming out and participating in those protests. You know, you could argue it's building momentum in the sense that there are lots of protests that happen between those very large-scale days of action. For example, my team at the CrowdCounting Consortium documented that June 2026 actually had the third most protest events in a month in the entire first and second Trump administrations.

5:44And that was largely in reaction to ICE in Minneapolis and the killings that happened there. But that just speaks to the fact that the pace of protests and the pace of protest mobilization is quite high and increasing over time, even between these big days of protests. And then when it comes to defections, you know, I think that there are some there are kind of cases where we see that happening and there are cases where we don't and where you'd otherwise expect them to happen. And I think that's a pretty natural thing to expect at this stage of a movement, which is to say, you know, the mobilization against, you know, autocratic consolidation in the U.S.

6:29has been going on now for the entirety of the second Trump administration. but has, you know, the average movement takes about two and a half years or three years to sort of run its course in creating the defections, cascades that are sort of necessary to bring about a pro-democratic outcome. And so I think it's sort of on pace, but still with the way to go. And then when it comes to diversity or sort of a broader range of methods of protest, so it's clear that the large-scale days of action are important in both bringing in new participants to the movement and in encouraging existing and new participants about the power of their collective action.

7:10The key here is channeling it into political power through encouraging people then to meet in their communities, to build more community-based organizations, to channel it into electoral power, to potentially channel it into methods of non-cooperation and other strategies of dissent. And then the last thing I'll note is I think it probably is one of the most disciplined movements we've seen in recent years in terms of the ability to not overreact to provocations and to maintain basically nonviolent discipline, even as repression has been escalating in a way that signals that the movement is both prepared for that repression and that when that repression happens, the movement can respond to it in a way that shifts the balance of power rather than sort of succumbing to potential disarray or indiscipline.

8:01Scott Galloway:Yeah, that really struck me. Nine million people. And I have yet to see any reports of any type of violence or civil disobedience. Any thoughts on one of the criteria was that the participants in the protests are from a diverse group? My understanding is these protests, no kings. And by the way, I find them inspiring. And I don't mean in any way to be critical of them, but people have brought up the notion they seem to be, the participants seem to be older and whiter. Any thoughts on their ability or the importance of reaching across different demographic groups to make these more effective? It really depends on where it's happening, for one thing.

8:42So I think that the people who have actually done surveys and done demographic counts in those surveys have noted from some of the big cities that they've seen this kind of that demographic description that you just gave. But, you know, there were over three, probably over 3000 events that happened on Saturday, many of them in places that have never seen a protest in the last generation. Many of them.

9:11Scott Galloway:A lot of rural towns, right, that are mostly Republican. Yeah, exactly. And and I think really there's also kind of a convergence, I would say, in some places where ICE operations have been very intense, that has drawn in a lot of younger people and people from different walks of life into the movement. And so I actually think this last No Kings saw the convergence of, you know, it was probably more demographically diverse than the prior, in part because of how many streams of opposition and resistance are kind of diverging in those big days of action. Clearly, like, the more people from the more walks of life who take part, the more powerful the movement will be.

9:57And it's often the case that movements, you know, different formations appeal to different demographics. And the more those formations come together, the more powerful they will be and shoring up the capacities of those different segments of society.

10:14Scott Galloway:I wonder, I'll just put a word of thesis and literally I'm flying on instruments here, but I wonder if some of it is that younger Americans, the most recent protests, Black Lives Matter and the Women's Marches, which were inspiring, but I'm not sure those groups felt like they registered a lot of change. Whereas older Americans still remember the protests, the Vietnam protests, civil rights protests, or at least learned about them in school, which had a huge impact. I wonder if it's just one group says, this is worth my Saturday and another group is maybe a little bit more cynical. You could be on to something in some cases.

10:51I would just note that there's some interesting research out there that shows that, for example, the Women's March of 2017 was the participation in women's marches just in that single day had a really powerful predictive effect on the diversity of candidates that ran in the midterm elections in 2018. and the blue wave that came in 2018 flipping Congress to be a Democratic Congress. They can show a strong correlation between the numbers of people who participated on that day and the outcome of that election. And the same is true for the 2020 election, actually, that large participation in Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 were also correlated with outcomes in the presidential election results and in shifts in public opinion and in changes that were substantive around, for example, progressive attorneys general or DAs being, you know, elevated in local and state elections.

11:55So, you know, I think that there are there are reasons to be skeptical, but also those types of stories aren't necessarily very prominent out there in the world. And and I think it can be really important to elevate the ways that even a single day of protests can have those types of electoral impacts. Same for the Tea Party. The Tea Party protests. There was a paper by economists that showed that it was powerfully correlated with the 2010 midterm election result. Right. So so people shouldn't underestimate how important it is and they shouldn't overestimate how important it is compared to the other things that also lead mass movements to succeed.

12:36Scott Galloway:Yeah. So one, a thesis and an observation, if the connection between inspiring candidates and people to turn out to the voting booth, and at a minimum, this creates infrastructure and makes you more invested in outcomes, right? It sounds as if, if this holds, and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't, it's going to be a very ugly November for Republicans. Yeah. I mean, if the pattern obtains in this case, then we would expect a loss in the midterms. Now, I also think that none of these models have predictive power, right? So lots of things can be different. But I think, yes, if what we saw in 2017 and 2018 tracks in this case, then we would expect in a normal kind of election year and under normal circumstances to see a similar outcome in the 2026 midterm.

13:36Scott Galloway:We'll be right back after a quick break. Thank you.

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17:10Scott Galloway:The other question I have for you is I keep hearing this three and a half percent number. And that is if you get to this three and a half percent hurdle, and I think it's 350 million people to set that would be 12.25 million, I think, if I'm doing my math correctly, somewhere in there, right? 12 plus million, that that's when you see real change, that that's when the government can't ignore it. Where did that number come from? And it strikes me that my understanding is the No Kings protest went from 7 million to 9 million. So it's building momentum. It's in no way fizzling out. And why is it we need to get to 12 and a quarter million?

17:48Scott Galloway:Do you buy that three and a half percent number? Where did it come from? Yeah. So the three and a half percent statistic is based on a historical observation of 323 mass movements between 1900 and 2006. And it came from a conversation I was having with an activist, actually, who asked me if there was some kind of critical threshold above which no movements had failed in terms of mass participation. And so this was after a study that Maria Stephan and I did. Our book had come out, and I was doing some workshops and talks about it. And so, like, just looked at the data and then found that observation that among the campaigns that we had documented and for which we had kind of peak participation estimates, none of the campaigns that had moved above that three and a half percent national population threshold had failed.

18:44So I think the things to know about that are, first of all, it's a historical observation, not a prediction. Second of all, as you know, historical observations are always just that. They're not also prescriptive, which is the sense that if we try to aim for 3.5%, knowing that that's the target, are we doing something different than what people did historically when they didn't know about that kind of a threshold and wouldn't have been trying to game it, as it were? And then the third piece is that there have been, since that period exceptions to the rule, which is to say, like Bahrain, for example, had its own attempted Arab awakening in 2011 that fizzled out fully by 2014.

19:30And in that case, it looks like during their peak moment, they had about 6 % of the population mobilized in their sort of central area. And that ended up failing. And one of the reasons that it was defeated is important and instructive. It was defeated because there were no defections. And there were no defections because, in that case, the monarchy decided not to send its own troops out to repress and got help from Saudi Arabia to do it. And that is a really important technique of preventing defections that we've then seen happen elsewhere. And the logic is that if there are fewer kind of social connections between the security forces and the people protesting, that there will be less hesitation and brutality toward the protesters.

20:23That's just something that has been an adaptation on the side of pretty persistent authoritarian regimes at this point and kind of taking the wind out of the sails of these movements, even when they get very large. And it's something that we should know. It's just that there have been adaptations on the government side and that movements shouldn't take for granted that if they hit a historical threshold that the same effects will naturally obtain without other types of strategy and organization building and leadership.

20:54Scott Galloway:So granted, it's probably harder to get more granular data, but the protests in Iran, a different complexion, much, I would argue, more complex, more severe, whatever the term is. What are your observations? What do you think the media is getting wrong about the protests to date in Iran? I guess I have two observations about it. I mean, first of all, the repression that took place against the civilian population there, massacres that took place are some of the worst we've seen since, for sure, the Syrian revolution in 2011 and 2012. You know, one of the things that I remember happening at that point is that after the U.S.

21:44extracted Maduro and brought him to the United States, there was strong and powerful signaling by the United States that Iran would be next. and that coincided with a period of improvised protests in response to basically economic concerns like, you know, a currency crisis and other things that people were reacting to on the ground and then when it sounded like there was going to be some kind of external intervention, from what I understand, there was a sense of now or never among many of the protesters who were aware of that And it allowed for or even enabled more risky action than they otherwise would have taken.

22:32And then the fact that the U.S. didn't actually intervene at that time or do a similar operation, as it were, you know, just kind of speaks to the very tricky global dynamics of these things. And the, as they say, moral hazard problem of signaling different types of international support when none is necessarily forthcoming. and that the people on the ground pay the price. I think, and there are some similar dynamics with that and the Syrian revolution, in fact. I remember in those days there were people who were exiles from Syria or, you know, had recently departed from there trying to lobby, you know, foreign governments to intervene the way that they had intervened in Libya.

23:17And there was a sense that was almost inevitable that it was going to happen in Syria. and more risky action was taken as a result of that in a way. So I think that's really very tricky. The second observation I would have is that what happens on the ground in Iran is so hard because there is not really a formal opposition or opposition groups that have the capacity to even connect with one another, much less organize a strategic mass movement.

23:50Scott Galloway:Or spokespeople. Isn't that key to our resistance that you have spokespeople that people can rally around? Spokespeople for sure, but also just strategy, right? Like thinking about beyond just going to the streets and trying to amass large shows of force, but also like how to tap into the different sources of weakness in the government and begin to, you know, chip away at loyalties. Like those types of things are really important and necessary, particularly against an authoritarian regime as durable and as formidable as the Iranian regime. And so what organizational capacity does exist is outside the country, right?

24:30So you have people who are sort of more recent departures from Iran, from, say, the reform era, who have more ties to people on the ground, but fewer kind of resources to help mobilize. And then you have people from the previous era, like the previous Iranian revolution, many of whom are kind of organizing around the crown prince and the like. And so even the external opposition is quite divided. And those who are rallying around Reza Pahlavi, like, don't have nearly as much legitimacy on the ground as the more recent departures, but they don't have the capacity that he has and the resources. So it's just a very, very tricky situation that I think helps to illuminate a lot of the fact that when people rise up anymore, it's not just against their own government.

25:21Like they're in this sort of global environment that's changing very quickly and it's creating very challenging terrain. I had Admiral James Stavridis on, who was the NATO Supreme Allied Commander, and he said something obvious but insightful, and that is the shock troops, kind of the Marines of the protests, the ones who are most aggressive

25:43Scott Galloway:and, quite frankly, willing to give up their lives, and they did. that there was 30 ,000 of them and they're dead now. And that our timing was just wrong, right? That you wanted support from America or perhaps military action before those 30 ,000 people took to the streets. And there's gonna be a limited supply of people who are willing to give their lives for a movement like this. I have been shocked at the lack of resistance and the lack of protest amongst corporate leaders. I'm convinced that of the Fortune 500 leaders, 490 of them wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and say, hello, madam or Mr.