When do citizens support government decisions to ignore social protests? The role of instrumental considerations and majoritarian preferences

In democracies, protests can challenge public policy reforms, raising questions on how governments should respond. Our study examines how citizens in the Netherlands would prefer their governments to respond to social protests. Using a pre-registered survey experiment (N = 1262), we varied the level of government implementing a reform and the level of public support for a reform. We used observational data to assess respondents’ views on the reforms and their trust in the government. While our findings reveal relatively strong support for accommodating social protests, citizens are more likely to back governments that ignore protests when these reforms have majority support and align with their own views. Trust in the government also plays a role, but the level of government does not matter for citizens’ attitudes. Overall, our findings highlight that citizens expect governments to listen to social protests but their attitudes are further contingent upon instrumental reasoning and majoritarian views of democracy.