When Should Governments Listen to Social Protests? The Role of Instrumental Considerations and Majoritarian Preferences

Governments often face social protests contesting their policies and reform plans. In liberal democracies, governments are expected to listen to and consider the demands of the protesters. But in reality, there is often a trade-off between accommodating protesters and enacting timely and effective policies. We study the preferences of citizens for government actions in the context of significant social protests – from canceling and delaying the policies to pushing through with the reforms ignoring protesters to banning protests altogether. To do that, we conduct a survey experiment in the Netherlands in which we manipulate the level of government enacting reforms contested by social protests and whether the reforms are supported or opposed by a majority of the citizens. We also measure whether respondents agree with the substance of the reforms and their trust in government. The results indicate that people are more likely to support governments pushing through with reforms and ignoring social protests when the reforms enjoy majority support and respondents agree with the direction of the reform proposal. Trust in government has a similar effect, but the level of government does not matter. There is very little support for banning protests altogether, and none of the factors we consider predict this attitude. These findings suggest that – even in well-established democracies – citizens’ views on whether governments should listen to, rather than ignore, social protests are contingent on the policy content of the contested government reforms and the existence of majority support for such reforms in society; hence, on a mixture of instrumental and principled reasons, with the principle reflecting a majoritarian view of democracy.