Do Liberals Protest More Than Conservatives?
The personality traits of liberals may make them more likely to protest publicly.
Posted June 23, 2025 | Reviewed by Devon Frye
As of the time of this post, we do not have a verified figure for the number of people who demonstrated against the perceived autocratic policies of the Trump administration in the June 14 "No Kings" protest. We know that the number is very large.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, which helped to organize the protest, the number of participants exceeded 5 million , which would make it the third largest single-day protest in the history of the United States. What encourages large numbers of people to engage in public protest?
Which Protests Draw the Biggest Crowds?
The Wikipedia entry " List of protests and demonstrations in the United States by size " might give us a clue about what motivates public protest. We must keep in mind that Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced repository of information rather than a scientific data archive, so caution is advised in accepting the precise accuracy of Wikipedia information.
Nonetheless, there is one trend in these protest data that appears so overwhelmingly obvious that I'd argue that we can accept the trend as real, regardless of the exact accuracy of the figures: The issues underlying the largest one-day protests in the United States are mostly associated with liberal, progressive causes.
These liberal causes include ending police brutality, environmental protection, pushing back against Donald Trump , anti-poverty, feminism, gun control, immigrant rights, LGBTQ rights, anti-nuclear policies, anti- racism , opposition to the Vietnam war, opposition to the Gaza war, the climate, civil rights, labor rights, opposition to the Iraq war, and anti-globalism.
Of the 34 protests listed, only two reflect traditional conservative values (the 2013 March for Life anti-abortion protest and the 2009 Tea Party protest for fiscal conservatism). The estimated attendance for the two conservative protests ranked 17th and 23rd for crowd size.
If you are uncertain about the Wikipedia data, you can examine scientific data gathered by the Crowd Counting Consortium at the Harvard Kennedy School. This consortium takes a more fine-grained approach to counting crowd size at protests, aiming to document all protests that occur on every day of the year.
The data are limited to three waves of data collection: 2017-2020, 2021-2024, and 2025 to the present. This means that it does not include older protests such as Earth Day and the March for Life. But you can download the data yourself, sort the protests by the number of participants (low, high, or average estimates), and see whether the largest protests were about liberal or conservative causes.
What you will find appears to confirm the Wikipedia data and suggests that political liberals are more likely than conservatives to engage in visible, public protests (Fisher, et al., 2019; Gethin & Pons, 2024)—although there has been an uptick in conservative protests over time, particularly against COVID restrictions and perceived election fraud (Caren, 2023; Ulfelder, 2022).
Why Might Liberals Protest More Often?
But this is just the beginning of an answer to the question of what motivates large numbers of people to engage in public protest. What is it about being politically liberal that encourages one to protest?
Samuel J. Abrams (2016), a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, has documented that university faculty have long leaned to the left but that the percentage of far-left faculty has increased from 40 percent to 60 percent since 1990, while political moderates have decreased by a quarter and conservatives, by one-third. In an op-ed for the American Enterprise Institute, Abrams (2023) pointed out that many public protests occur on university campuses and that left-leaning professors may encourage their students to participate in these protests. Abrams also points to data from the PACE’s 2021 Civic Language Perceptions Project indicating that public protest is an important value to many liberals.
In previous PT articles ( here and here ), I explained how values represent one of the most important kinds of personality traits. Values are emotionally charged beliefs about what is good, right, and important. Values motivate us to strive toward our life goals . Values define our identity , the core of who we are, and we are drawn toward people with similar values.
Public protest is complexly determined by both social and personality factors (Duncan, 2018). It may be that part of what it means to possess a liberal identity is the value of protesting openly.
A research article by Fishkin, Keniston, and MacKinnon (1973) begins by with a claim that among more than 300 empirical studies of student activists, no results are as impressive as those achieved in a series of studies conducted by Norma Haan and Jeanne Block on student protestors at Berkeley (e.g., Haan, Smith, & Block, 1968). These studies showed that student protestors were often found at Kohlberg's most morally principled level (postconventional) and that non-protestors scored in the middle (conventional) level.
However, Haan et al.'s research also indicated that Kohlberg's conventional morality is followed mostly by conservatives, and postconventional morality by liberals. Further research by Hogan (1970) showed that Kohlberg's scheme should not be interpreted in terms of increasing degrees of moral maturity, but rather in terms of personality style and political preferences.
Does Openness Play a Part?
Which personality dispositions incline liberals toward public protest? One potential determinant of public protesting is political self-efficacy —the belief that one's public actions make a real difference (Duncan, 2018; Vecchione & Caprara, 2009). Liberals tend to be higher in political self-efficacy than conservatives.
But perhaps the most robust predictor of public protesting is openness to experience and similar traits like cognitive flexibility and autonomy (Duncan, 2018). High levels of openness to experience indicate a tendency to challenge tradition and established ways of thinking and behaving.
Liberals typically score much higher on openness than conservatives; in fact, one of the six facet scales of openness focuses on liberal political values (Johnson, 2014). If one thinks about the nature of protest, it almost always involves challenging the establishment and status quo, so it makes sense that open individuals are more likely to engage in protests. In contrast, conservatives prefer to work within traditional systems and respect the established order, and so may be more prone to engaging in activities, like voting, that adhere to these beliefs (Fisher et al, 2019).
Abrams, S. (2016, January 9). Professors moved left since 1990s, rest of country did not. Blog of the Heterodox Academy. https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/professors-moved-left-but-country-did-not/
Abrams, S. J. (2023, June 20). Critical differences in protesting between liberals and conservatives. Here’s why. Op-Ed for the American Enterprise Institute. https://www.aei.org/op-eds/critical-differences-in-protesting-between-liberals-and-conservatives-heres-why/
Caren, N. (2023). Right-wing protest in the United States, 2017 to 2022. Socius , 9 . https://doi.org/10.1177/23780231231181900
Duncan, L. E. (2018). The psychology of collective action. In K. Deaux & M. Snyder (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of personality and social psychology (2nd ed., pp. 885-908). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190224837.013.36
Fisher, D. R., Andrews, K. T., Caren, N., Chenoweth, E., Heaney, M. T., Leung, T., Perkins, L. N., & Pressman, J. (2019). The science of contemporary street protest: New efforts in the United States. Science Advances , 5 (10), Article eaaw5461. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaw5461
Fishkin, J., Keniston, K., & MacKinnon, C. (1973). Moral reasoning and political ideology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 27 (1), 109-119. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/h0034434
Gethin, A., & Pons, V. (2024, April). Social movements and public opinion in the United States. Working paper 32342, National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w32342
Haan, N., Brewster Smith, M., & Block, J. (1968). Moral reasoning of young adults: Political-social behavior, family background, and personality correlates. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 10 (3), 183-201. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/h0026566
Hogan, R. (1970). A dimension of moral judgment. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology , 35 (2), 205-212. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/h0030095
Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the five factor model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality , 51 , 78-89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2014.05.003
Ulfelder, J. (2022, December 30). Review of right-wing U.S. protest activity in 2022. Blog of the Crowd Counting Consortium. https://countingcrowds.org/2022/12/30/review-of-right-wing-u-s-protest-activity-in-2022/
Vecchioni, M., & Caprara, G. V. (2009). Personality determinants of political participation: The contribution of traits and self-efficacy beliefs. Personality and Individual Differences , 46 (4), 487-492. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2008.11.021
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John A. Johnson, Ph.D. , is a professor emeritus of psychology at Pennsylvania State University.
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