Paper · June 2026
Does Unemployment Increase Protest Participation? Evidence from the 2020 George Floyd BLM Protests During COVID-19
An Elicit systematic review on pandemic unemployment as a protest mobilizer.
Elicit Systematic Review (Automated literature synthesis (Semantic Scholar + OpenAlex corpus))
Abstract
Sudden pandemic unemployment increased BLM protest participation through economic shock effects that heightened racial grievances, amplified by biographical availability from lockdowns; health insurance decoupling received minimal empirical testing.
Summary
An automated Elicit literature synthesis examining whether the sudden unemployment shock of the COVID-19 lockdowns increased participation in the 2020 George Floyd protests, and through what mechanisms (economic shock, biographical availability, health-insurance decoupling).
Data Provenance & Ingestion Integrity