The first and last chapters of LaGina Gause’s new book, The Advantage of Disadvantage, open with historical anecdotes that hearken back to the American Revolution, reminding us that protest has always been core to the project that is American democracy. The first chapter opens with an account of the Boston Tea Party, while the last chapter describes a lesser-known skirmish in which angry American colonists confront British soldiers seeking to enforce British tax laws. Both incidents represent forms of protest, but while the first was carried out with the support of the wealthy, white Sons of Liberty, the second was, as John Adams described it, “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, and mulattoes, Irish teagues, and outlandish jack tars,” including Crispus Attucks (quoted at p. 170). Adams, who resoundingly supported the Boston Tea Party, denounced Attucks and his compatriots and acted as legal defense for those who shot them.
These two historical stories capture the core question and insights in Gause’s excellent book. Who, or which groups, she asks, benefit legislatively from engaging in collective efforts like protest? Unlike other research in this area, Gause’s book takes seriously the differentials in the lived experience of people who engage in protest. The racial and economic backgrounds of the protestors made a difference in the historical incidents described here, a pattern that remains unchanged in contemporary America. How is it, then, that protest works when those who need to protest often need it precisely because they are structurally marginalized in the status quo? When people who are structurally disadvantaged in politics protest, does it correct those imbalances, and if so, why? Gause’s book seeks to explain the ways in which the differential resources of protestors affect the ways their actions are perceived, heard, and addressed by legislators.
In an era of mostly dismal news about politics, The Advantage of Disadvantage offers a buoyant antidote—legislators are actually more responsive to less-resourced groups, she argues. How could that be? The book begins with a careful theoretical description of her counterintuitive argument, drawing on a formal model that explicates a theory of costly protest and legislator behavior. Gause’s theory begins with the assumption that legislators want to be re-elected. In a complex world in which myriad groups and problems are seeking legislators’ attention and support, they are constantly trying to separate signal from noise to adjudicate which bids for attention could have implications for re-election, and which ones would not. Protest by high-resource groups, she argues, send ambiguous signals because legislators know that protest is not as costly for these groups. Simply put, everyone knows that it is easier for wealthy white people with more free time, easier access to information, and more resources to participate in public life. When those people get involved, it is not clear to legislators how salient the problem actually is. Groups who engage in protest despite it being costly to them, Gause argues, send a much stronger signal about the importance of the issue to them. When Black and Latino communities, poor communities, or intersectionally marginalized communities put in the effort to get involved, they only do it because they are really upset. Gause’s model describes the way the strength and clarity of that signal prompts legislators to respond when they recognize the costliness of the actions involved.
The Advantage of Disadvantage then walks through a series of careful empirical chapters that substantiate this argument. The first main empirical chapter shares the results of an original survey of elected officials and their staffs to verify some basic facts that have to be true for Gause’s theory to hold: are elected officials actually aware of protest events? Does it matter to them—is it a source of information—as they make decisions about legislation? Do they think strategically about how their decisions in response to collective action will affect their reelection? Are elected officials aware of the differential resource burdens of different types of people? How do they perceive the costs of protest for poor people versus wealthy people, and Black and Latino communities relative to others? Although the survey does not have a large n (a limitation Gause freely acknowledges), it largely verifies that the strategic calculus of elected officials generally matches the patterns she is describing.
The next three empirical chapters systemically examine the relationship between protest and roll call votes to test the theory. She draws on data from 1991–1995 in the Dynamics of Collective Action (DCA) dataset, which captures protest events reported in the New York Times and is a widely-regarded and widely-used dataset in the study of collective action. These chapters provide multivariate analyses of the effects of protest events in the DCA on roll-call voting behavior, showing that legislators do, in fact, pay attention to protest, and that they are particularly sensitive to protest amongst low-resource groups. Her analyses compare these effects to other factors that could shape the relationship between protest and legislative behavior, including both protest characteristics (such as the size, tactics, and media coverage of the protest) and legislator characteristics (such as the legislator’s own demographic background, partisanship, and electoral security). Although there are some extenuating conditions that are important to understand, the basic thrust of the argument consistently holds.
The final empirical chapter then broadens the scope to look beyond the DCA dataset into digitally enabled protest in 2012. Gause uses the same methods as DCA to identify and code 2012 protest events and builds an original dataset that enables her to examine the differential effects of digital technology on costly protest. This chapter then queries whether the digital technologies of the twenty-first century mitigated the resource disparities that exist for protestors. She finds that while digital technologies make protest itself easier—by allowing for quicker and easier information dissemination and so on—they do not ameliorate the basic resource divide that separates racially and economically marginalized communities from others. It is still costly for poor Black and Latino communities to engage in collective action, and legislators still recognize costly protest as a stronger signal in the digital age.
Putting all the pieces together, The Advantage of Disadvantage provides a counterintuitive, compelling, and hopeful account of the way in which protest and collective action can ameliorate some of the basic inequities that plague American politics. Martin Luther King famously said that “a riot is the language of the unheard,” but until The Advantage of Disadvantage, we have not yet had a systematic analysis of why those who have ignored the unheard suddenly hear them through protest. Gause’s blend of sophisticated formal modeling and meticulous empirical analysis offers not only a cogent account of the relationship of costly protest and legislative behavior, it also provides an explanation for why the patterns she finds exist. She also illuminates questions that scholars of collective action and social movements would be smart to heed—for instance, she highlights the importance of risk, and the extent to which the risk that protestors undertake conditions the probability they will get a positive response from legislators. But what do those of us who study collective action know about risk, and the conditions under which poor communities of color are willing and able to take on the material, social, and emotional risks that protest and collective action often entail? As such, the book makes important contributions not only to the study of protest and collective action but also to the study of representation.
As with any good, thought-provoking book, however, some questions do remain at the end. For instance, in 2022, it is impossible not to wonder how conditional the findings are on the time periods that were studied. The 2017 women’s march after the inauguration of Donald Trump and the outpouring of protest after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 were two high-profile instances of people of diverse backgrounds taking on costly protest actions without necessarily seeing the kind of results they might have hoped. Another way to ask the same question might be to ask how the value of any one signal might change as it becomes more widespread. Given increases in protest activity in recent years, should we expect an increase or decrease in responsiveness? Relatedly, by focusing on the signaling effect of protests Gause’s book black-boxes the strategic agency of protest leaders themselves. In my own work, like the co-authored book under review here, I think about the relationship of collective action and representation from the perspective of those engaging in collective action—namely, what, if anything, can they be doing to make it more likely that the political system will heed their concerns? Gause’s book tackles this question from the other side—how can we unpack the strategic calculus legislators use to make decisions about representation, and how can we understand why they might care? But what does her answer tell us about what protestors and leaders can do to navigate the political hurdles they face? Is their only role to try to maximize the costliness of protest to strengthen the signal they send, or is there a role for strategic leadership and negotiation in translating the resources of the protest (risk, costly action, etc.) into legislative action? These questions are, in the end, the sign of a bold book that invites its readers to think deeply. As such, it is sure to become a widely read and much discussed text for anyone who studies protest, collective action, or legislative representation.
