Anticipating Backlash

How does the anticipation of citizens’ backlash impact activists’ lobbying strategies? I model a Markov game between activists and citizens, and find the implication that domestic activists anticipating backlash have incentives to distance from transnational rhetoric pre-emptively. I then examine the case of the anti-sexual violence movement in Indonesia with a combination of historical research, interviews, and text data scraped from >1000 news articles covering a sexual violence prevention bill from 17 major Indonesian news outlets. Despite wide diversity in privately-held preferences, I find homogeneity in activists’ use of conservative frames and avoidance of feminist frames. Interviews with leadership confirm organizations adopted this strategy to delay and minimize backlash. Press coverage citing left-wing activists is more likely to use words associated with victimhood and less likely to use words associated with feminism than media covering their right-wing counterparts. These counter-intuitive findings suggest that activists’ caution towards backlash can impact the evolution of discourse on controversial topics within an entire nation.

Supplementary notes and dataset forthcoming upon publication.