Gillion’s research examines whether a protest can make a real change – and the short answer is that it does. Looking at the effect of civil rights protests from the 1960’s–1990’s on Congress, he found that protest had a small but detectable effect on legislators. And he identified factors that increased the salience of a protest to politicians.

Tweets are not a good way to judge elected leader's climate actions: the frequency with which Congresspeople tweet on climate is only weakly linked to their constituents’ opinions, and not linked to their climate voting record at all. In an analysis of US members of Congress over the 6 months prior to the 2020 election, constituent support for Congressional climate action was only weakly related to the rate of pro-climate tweeting by legislators.