Disruption, Deservingness and Perceptions of Environmental Protest: Survey Experimental Evidence from Chile and South Africa

Environmental protest has become one of the most visible forms of political contention in recent years, ranging from global climate strikes to local mobilizations against environmental degradation. These protests are particularly salient in unequal societies, where environmental harms and their consequences are often distributed unequally across social groups. Yet, the effectiveness of environmental protest depends crucially on how it is perceived by the broader public. Existing research highlights the importance of protest characteristics such as worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment (Tilly, 2004), as well as the role of tactics ranging from conventional to disruptive or violent (Tarrow, 1998). However, we know less about how these factors interact with inequality in shaping public opinion.
This paper investigates how inequality shapes perceptions of environmental protest by focusing on three interrelated dimensions: who protests, for what cause, and how. First, we examine whether protests led by directly affected communities elicit different perceptions than those organized by professional environmental NPOs. Second, we analyze whether the substantive framing of protest matters; specifically, whether environmental issues are presented alone or coupled with health impacts, which might trigger strong deservingness heuristics (Jensen & Petersen, 2017). Third, we study how these dynamics interact with the use of disruptive or violent tactics, which are typically judged as illegitimate (Feinberg et al., 2020), but which may be evaluated differently when they are employed in defense of highly deserving groups.
We test these questions through a comparative survey experiment in Chile and South Africa with 2,000 respondents each. These cases allow us to probe whether inequality conditions the public’s evaluation of environmental protest, and whether perceptions of legitimacy differ across contexts marked by economic disparities, social exclusion, and histories of contentious politics. By systematically varying who protests, for what issue, and with what tactics, our study sheds light on the mechanisms through which environmental protests gain or lose attention and which are dismissed as illegitimate disruptions.
Our findings contribute to debates on political participation, deservingness, and redistribution by showing how inequality mediates the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate environmental protest. In doing so, the project advances our understanding of when protest, an essential democratic practice, helps level the playing field in unequal societies, and when it risks reproducing existing inequalities in political influence.