The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
When Do Protests Actually Work? — with Erica Chenoweth
09 Apr 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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 dancer. True story.
No joke. True story.
Go, go, go!
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 Mal, specifically on the topic of resist and unsubscribe. Anyways, with that, here's our conversation with Erika Chenoweth. 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. The 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.
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Chapter 2: What factors contribute to the success or failure of protest movements?
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 Crowd County Consortium documented that June 2026 actually had the third most protest events in a month. in the entire first and second Trump administrations.
And 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.
has 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 a 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.
The 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 recently.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of the 3.5% rule in protests?
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. I 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 participation
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.
So, you know, I think that there are reasons to be skeptical, but also those types of stories aren't necessarily very prominent out there in the world. And I think it can be you know, really important to elevate the ways that even a single day of protest 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 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.
Yeah, so one, a thesis and then 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 the, 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.
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Chapter 4: How do economic actions compare to traditional protests?
allowed for or even enabled more risky action than they otherwise would have taken.
And then the fact that the US 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 had recently departed from there trying to lobby foreign governments to intervene the way that they had intervened in Libya. And 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.
Chapter 5: How can mass mobilization impact the effectiveness of protests?
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 the 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?
So 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
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...
the fact that when people rise up anymore, it's not just against their own government. Like, they're in this sort of global environment that's changing very quickly, and it's creating very challenging terrain.
At 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 protest, the ones who are most aggressive and, quite frankly, willing to give up their lives, and they did, there was 30,000 of them and they're dead now.
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Chapter 6: What strategies can activists use to create defections among opponents?
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 500, Fortune 500 leaders, 490 of them wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and say, hello, madam or Mr. President. I think they're all waiting to be drafted to run for president. And I have been, the silence is deafening.
And whatever your politics are, I think there's a very solid argument that what is going on right now is not good for business at a very capitalist level. and there has been crickets.
Have you done any research on the importance of, I go back to Weimar, Germany, when a lot of the industrial captains of industry in Germany stayed quiet or kind of did a deal with Hitler, if you will, but any parallels or any historical references around the lack of protest or resistance from the corporate world in your studies?
So this is a really important issue. It's not my primary area, but what I'll say is if you think about cases like South Africa, for example, this is a case where clearly the linchpin in the sustainability of apartheid ended up being the corporate and business elite.
And that was a case where the security forces were never gonna defect to, you know, the sort of United Democratic Front and the Black opposition. But the sort of implication of that was that if the security force pillar is not available, then what about the business and economic elites that are upholding, you know, the apartheid state?
And so that is the way that apartheid ultimately fell, was by a variety of economic actions, whether those were boycotts of white-owned businesses, whether they were... ultimately multinational corporations pulling out of the country, whether it was strikes and work stoppages combined with massive protests and marches.
Like, that is ultimately what pressured the business class to pressure the National Party, which was the pro-apartheid party, to elect a reformer in de Klerk when they had the opportunity to do so. And when he came to power in the National Party, he immediately pushed through legislation to unban the ANC and start negotiations.
And they found a path to a democratic transition without a civil war in a country that looked like it was on the path to either continued democracy you know, military garrison state with a white supremacist government, or it was on the path to civil war.
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Chapter 7: What lessons can be learned from the No Kings protests?
to focus on more than the sort of four things that I mentioned that successful movements do, right? And I think those things are happening. So I guess this is all to say I wouldn't really suggest that much is different in the country except what I mentioned about a sort of broader umbrella formation helping to make it more than the sum of its parts.
You brought up something that I hadn't thought of before that I think is an outstanding example that we don't talk enough about. Can you talk about what went down in South Korea?
So the really abbreviated version of this is that last December, there was an attempted coup by the incumbent president. And while it was underway, meaning after he declared martial law and was enacting the coup, there was a huge umbrella formation largely represented by a trade federation.
and unions that came out and said, by declaring martial law, you've declared the end of your presidency, and we're going to bring the country to an orderly standstill tomorrow morning if this thing goes down. And they were able to bring thousands of people to, within minutes of the declaration of martial law, also to a nonviolent protest outside of the
like a main government building, and by the morning had made such a credible commitment to being able to shut down the country that the people who were doing the coup blinked, basically, like the senior military kind of hesitated and said they didn't think they would go along with it. And the president had to basically cancel the martial law order and effectively try to cancel the coup.
And then, you know, by the next day, the trade unions and the sort of pro-democracy movement had come out and said, we're really glad the coup has ended, but that's not enough. Like, you tried to have a coup, and so you're going to be impeached.
And they launched impeachment proceedings after one failed attempt because the ruling party tried to get around a quorum rule so that they didn't have to show up and actually participate in the impeachment proceedings. The movement basically demanded that they show up and vote, and they did, and the president was impeached. And then he tried to appeal it. He lost the appeal in the Supreme Court.
Like, he's out and going to be held accountable for it. So that's the way both a successful movement works and how to stop a coup and prevent it from happening again. I think one of the things that's so powerful about the example is that they could credibly commit that they could bring the country to an orderly standstill. That's why it worked.
And so I think the deterrent impact that they were able to have was profound. And it's just a lesson to learn, I think.
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