In pursuit of racial equality: Identifying the determinants of support for the Black Lives Matter Movement with a systematic review and multiple meta-analyses (and a brief teaser of FORRT, the Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training)

Flavio Azevedo (postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK)

“I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe” were the last words of Eric Garner and George Floyd before being murdered by those who swore to protect them. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement arose to put a much-needed spotlight on police brutality and systemic racism against Black people in the United States. In two comprehensive studies, we sought to investigate systematically the demographic, political, and psychological bases of support for the BLM movement. First, we conducted a systematic review and narratively synthesized the determinants of BLM support investigated in the published literature. A total of 1590 records were identified and findings of 24 studies (N_pooled=27,691) were summarized along six categories relating to demographics, race, partisanship and ideology, discrimination and prejudice, and social and psychological attitudes. Second, we exhaustively searched for determinants of BLM support across seventeen probability-based nationally representative datasets (N_pooled=31,779), finding 37 common predictors for which individual meta-analyses were conducted to estimate the strength and robustness of their associations. Our results suggest that there is a near-perfect match between BLM opposition and positive attitudes towards American institutions deeply rooted in systemic racism. The present work contributes to a broad categorization of correlates of BLM support across social, psychological, and political domains. 

The seminar will take place at the center as well as in this virtual seminar room.