(Illustration by Matt Chase)
When protest movements erupt, governments and opponents often try to make them look bad by accusing protesters of accepting foreign money. A new study shows how this tactic works and how it affects public support for the movement’s goals.
“Public accusations of foreign meddling damage protest groups by reducing public support,” write authors Dov Levin, associate professor of international relations at the University of Hong Kong, and Wilfred M. Chow, assistant professor in the School of International Studies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. “These findings reveal how referencing foreign backing is a potent discrediting tactic—it influences public opinion, a critical determinant for protest outcomes.”
Levin devised the research question in the late 2010s, a decade when social protests were sweeping the world. “I noticed that there were these accusations of foreign interference, and I became very curious about this topic,” he says. For example, the presidents of Ecuador and Chile blamed domestic protests against government austerity measures in 2019 on Venezuelan agitators and President Nicolás Maduro. He and Chow joined forces to look into the question and found that the existing literature didn’t have a definitive answer.
The pair conducted a study presenting a fictional situation where American and Canadian protests against an oil pipeline for environmental reasons garner accusations of foreign interference.
Online, the authors surveyed about 2,500 American adults and about 2,600 Canadian adults. Each participant was told about the hypothetical protest and informed that the protesters were from a particular group that either was or was not associated with a marginalized minority. Some were given further information that a foreign government or interest had funded or helped the protests in the United States or Canada.
The results revealed that the public develops strongly negative feelings toward a social movement that is suspected of accepting overseas funding. If told that a protest was funded by foreign interests, respondents tended to support the police taking a hard line against protesters and did not feel the government should make concessions in line with the protesters’ views. A surprising finding, Levin said, was that the effect was unconditional, with the data showing no significant difference if the protesters were from an in-group or out-group. In other words, the public’s feelings about supposedly foreign-funded protests were not based on antipathy toward any racial or minority group the protesters represented.
Similarly, the survey participants didn’t have a different reaction depending on which foreign nation was accused of meddling (Saudi Arabia, Norway, or Russia), the sort of aid it was suspected of giving, or whether the help came before or after the protest movement started. Regardless, just being told that a foreign power was involved helped color the respondents’ views of the protests. The effect held both in the United States and in Canada.
Another surprising result was the hostility of environmentalists themselves toward the climate protesters in the experiment when told that the fictional group was suspected of receiving funding from abroad. This could be because, as true believers, they reacted strongly against protesters with uncertain motives—even if the cause itself was an issue they supported. The study surfaced fears about the involvement of overseas interests, even in a country like Canada where the public is not considered to be strongly nationalistic.
The takeaway for practitioners is that domestic social movements can suffer greatly if they are discovered to be linked to overseas funding. Foreign governments and entities might be hurting a movement rather than helping it by sending money. Governments airing suspicions of foreign interference with a local protest could see positive results, by contrast, as their domestic audience recoils from the social movement’s aims.
Movement leaders should also be aware of this pernicious effect. “If you are a protester, you really should be careful about taking foreign money,” Chow says. “That can be very damaging in terms of public support for your own cause.”
Find the full study: “Muddying the Waters: How Perceived Foreign Interference Affects Public Opinion on Protest Movements” by Wilfred M. Chow and Dov H. Levin, American Political Science Review, forthcoming.
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.