Millions of people took to the streets last weekend in solidarity against President Donald Trump. Protest signs and public speeches decried his administration's attacks on immigrants, LGBTQ people and other vulnerable groups. Many protesters deemed current policies an affront to civil rights.
But framing modern social issues as attacks on civil rights may actually backfire, according to a new study published in the journal American Sociological Review. While most people hold positive views about civil rights in the abstract, framing contemporary problems like discrimination or poverty as civil rights violations actually decreases public support for government action.
"Even more surprising to us was how widespread this negative effect was," said Kim Voss, a UC Berkeley professor of sociology and co-author of the study.
A scholar of labor and social movements, Voss said the findings might be partly explained by people's "idealized," if flawed, recollection of the Civil Rights Movement. She and her coauthors speculate that framing hardships today as civil rights violations evokes comparisons with the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, which makes contemporary problems appear less significant and therefore less worthy of government action.
Voss and her co-authors, Fabiana Silva and Irene Bloemraad , surveyed approximately 7,500 California voters to gauge feelings about civil rights and how voters define the term. Surveys were conducted in 2016 and 2019 to reflect times before and after Trump's first election.
Researchers also tested the effect of civil rights framing by having participants read three vignettes about people facing hardships. Some vignettes explicitly framed hardships as civil rights violations, while others were framed differently or had no frame at all. The team varied the types of hardships, including discrimination in the workplace and serious food insecurity, and also the demographic characteristics of the person facing the hardship.
After reading each story, participants were asked if they support government intervention to remediate the hardship.
While the team expected civil rights framing would be more effective for increasing support for government action to address discrimination than for material hardships, they were surprised to learn it was counterproductive for both. It was also ineffective for hardships faced by Black people.
UC Berkeley News spoke with Voss about this bipartisan "frame backfire," the recent "No Kings" protests and what a more effective technique for framing movements might look like.
UC Berkeley News: You and your colleagues say that when social movements on the political left and right appeal to civil rights, those arguments backfire. Why?
This was a surprising finding, one we did not expect. We term this effect "frame backfire" because civil rights framing was counterproductive across issues (material deprivation, unequal treatment), beneficiaries (African Americans, Mexican Americans, white Americans, undocumented Mexican immigrants) and audiences (liberals, conservatives, whites, African Americans, Latinos).
Importantly, we don't think these negative effects can be explained by a simple story of racial backlash. If that were the case, we would expect some groups — particularly those more likely to have anti-Black attitudes — to react more negatively than others.
But we found that liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, Black, Latino and white respondents all responded negatively to civil rights framing. In fact, we found that civil rights framing even reduced Black respondents' support for government action to address hardships faced by Black people, which is not what we would have expected from a straightforward racial backlash story.
Social movements adopt the civil rights frame because they look at the Civil Rights Movement as an important and successful movement in American history. They think that by using the rhetoric of that movement and shaping their appeals similarly, they are going to be more successful. However, our research indicates that is no longer the case.
How does our collective memory of the Civil Rights Movement factor into our perception of modern movements that use civil rights frames?
The scholarship on collective memory highlights how the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s has become a positive collective memory. But it's important to keep in mind that the collective memory of the Civil Rights Movement that is so often celebrated in contemporary textbooks and street names is highly idealized. It excludes the movement's more controversial aspects, such as the push for economic justice, decent housing, health care and jobs.
It also excludes just how controversial the Civil Rights Movement was in its heyday. In the 1960s, many Americans were disapproving of the movement, viewing its demands as too radical and its leaders as too disruptive. In 1966, for example, two-thirds of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of Martin Luther King Jr., a number that stands in stark contrast to the overwhelming percentage of Americans who hold a favorable view today.
We suspect that the idealized collective memory of the Civil Rights Movement may undermine the power of civil rights appeals today for two reasons. First, we believe that present-day appeals to civil rights evoke an implicit comparison to the historic Civil Rights Movement. Since contemporary hardships cannot match the flagrant state-sanctioned bigotry and violence of the civil rights era, the comparison makes today's hardships look lesser and thus less worthy of ameliorative government action. Second, because the idealized collective memory excludes the more controversial aspects of the historic Civil Rights Movement, today's movements seem less heroic and less worthy than the historic Civil Rights Movement.
So compared to hardships Black people faced decades ago, is it that today's struggles just feel less significant? And that undercuts activist arguments?
That's a big part of it. But also important is how the idealized memory of the historic Civil Rights Movement has scrubbed out the more radical and contentious aspects of the movement.
Do your new findings apply to groups invoking civil rights claims across the political left and right?
We know that contemporary groups make civil rights claims across the political spectrum — "immigrant rights are civil rights" or "trans rights are civil rights" or "gun rights are civil rights." Also, our research shows that a majority of political conservatives, as well as political liberals, express positive feelings toward civil rights.
Thus, it stands to reason that conservatives adopt the rhetoric and frame of the Civil Rights Movement because they, like progressives, assume that it helps to convince people to support their cause. Yet, if they do, our study indicates that such a strategy backfires, decreasing rather than increasing support for their movements.
At the same time, it's useful to note that the vignettes we used to investigate the resonance of civil rights involved people facing hardships focused on unequal treatment, sexual harassment and material needs — issues that tend to be of greater concern to liberals and those on the progressive side of American politics. We did not test vignettes involving the protection of gun owners or against abortion, which are the kind of issues about which those on the right are more likely to mobilize.
So if advocating on the basis of civil rights isn't effective, what is?
In our larger body of research, we explore appeals based on human rights and American values, as well as civil rights. Perhaps surprisingly, especially for those with progressive politics, referencing American values was more resonant for our respondents, even respondents on the left, than civil rights.
We don't infer from this that an American values appeal is the only, nor the best, alternative to a civil rights frame. Instead, we suggest that activists need to construct what social movement scholars refer to as a new "master frame."
Master frames are those that are broad enough, and flexible and inclusive enough, that they can be used by lots of groups to make claims about many diverse issues. Our research implies that a new master frame will be necessary if activists are to build public support for the kind of inclusive, egalitarian and generous U.S. envisaged in the historical Civil Rights Movement.
This focus on the "American values" frame reminds me of the Harris-Walz campaign's messaging around freedom in last year's election. Is that the kind of appeal you mean?
What I have in mind is that those struggling for social justice, including for immigrants and labor, need to reclaim and reframe American values, the flag and the meaning of national identification.
In one of our earlier research articles, we examined how frames affected support for undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens in need. For that article, we asked respondents what came to mind when they read the term "American values." We found that the term evoked many different ideals, some in conflict with each other, but some that nudged people toward greater inclusion of undocumented residents.
This suggests that those on the progressive left can't leave the framing of American values to the current administration or to conservatives. Instead, they should elaborate the meaning of American values in such a way that it becomes a foundation for an inclusive master frame.
Over the past week, thousands of people have protested the Trump administration. As a scholar of social movements, particularly around immigrants and labor, how are you thinking about the current moment?
The current moment is a scary time when the United States seems to be marching toward authoritarianism. I also think about how, during the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement, it was the police who were violent, not the protestors, and how that violence was often used to try to discredit the movement. A version of this is what we saw in Los Angeles last week.
The current moment is thus a time when it is crucially important to build a movement that can effectively challenge growing autocracy in the U.S., building instead a fairer, more inclusive U.S.
We need to develop both the mobilization and coordination of protests that might come. It's hopeful that we have this new frame emerging. I don't know where that's going, but articulating the opposition in terms of American values has real potential.
What will you be watching for as the current wave of protests continues to evolve?
At the "No Kings" protest last Saturday, I saw many American flags and banners that invoked American values in one way or another. For example, one sign at the Oakland protest proclaimed, "Kindness, Empathy, Compassion are American values." Another asserted, "Without Immigrants and Democracy, there would be no America." Yet a third declared, "We the people MUST protect the Constitution." I think these flags and banners are a hopeful sign.
But it's early days in the fight against the cruelty of recent ICE raids and the growth of authoritarianism in the U.S. My knowledge of the history of social movements suggests that there is a long road ahead, one that will require coordination of protest, strategic thinking, greater mobilization, and articulation of the kinds of framings I saw beginning to emerge at the Oakland protests last Saturday.
At the same time, and turning again to the historic Civil Rights Movement, I keep in mind the lesson that what might seem radical or too demanding today can become normal, even heroic, decades later. Might the protests we're seeing today be like that in the future?
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
