Does the Nobel Peace Prize influence public opinion? In an article (Kikuta and Hanayama 2024), we show that when the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to women’s rights activists, such as Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad in 2018, it improves people’s perceptions about women’s rights groups across the world. Further analysis indicates that the effect is particularly large among people who hold traditional gender values, implying that the prize pressured conservative people to amend their attitudes. This suggests that the seemingly symbolic event—the Nobel Peace Prize—has real-world impacts, encouraging further studies on symbolic actions in international relations.

Symbolic actions, such as blame and praise, are common in international politics. When Russia invaded Ukraine, not only did many national governments blame it, but NGOs, international organizations, and people also protested against it. Yet, such symbolic actions are often considered less effective; mere symbolic actions may not change the situation unless they come with more substantive actions such as economic sanctions and boycotts. Political scientists have challenged this notion by showing that the “naming and shaming” spotlights human rights violations, decreases the volumes of trade, investment, and aid from other countries, and hence serves to protect human rights (Hafner-Burton 2008; Barry, Clay, and Flynn 2013). However, those studies only look at “negative” symbolic actions without analyzing the effects of “positive” symbolic actions such as international awards. We address this void of knowledge by focusing on one of the most prominent international awards for peace—the Nobel Peace Prize. More specifically, we ask: when the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to women’s rights activists, does it change public opinion about gender issues?

Can You Trust “Women’s Rights Activists”?

At least theoretically, there are good reasons to believe that the Nobel Peace Prize changes how people perceive women’s rights activists. Currently, almost every country has multiple women’s rights organizations. While some of these organizations genuinely seek the protection of women’s rights, other activists may be too radical (e.g., anarchist feminists). Even worse, conservative opponents can label the activists as “radical feminists” or “femspeak.” Given the uncertainty, ordinary citizens cannot easily trust a self-claimed “women’s rights activist.” The Nobel Peace Prize addresses those problems by spotlighting genuine, reliable women’s rights activists. This lowers people’s mental barriers to trusting women’s rights activists.

Certainly, the Nobel Peace Prize can affect people differently, depending on their baseline gender values. For people with liberal gender values, the Prize can reassure the reliability of women’s rights activists. The Prize can also persuade people who are otherwise neutral or less interested in gender issues. Finally, people with conservative gender values may be pressured to amend their attitudes, or the Prize can elicit their backlash. Thus, although the effect may vary across baseline gender values, the “mere” symbolic action—the Nobel Peace Prize—can alter public opinion, which in turn can potentially bring more substantive changes.

The Nobel Peace Prize Changed Public Opinion

We empirically test those arguments by using a so-called natural experiment. Although it is usually not an easy task to rigorously identify the causal effect of the Nobel Peace Prize, we exploit the fact that one of the most comprehensive international public opinion surveys—the World Value Survey (WVS)—was conducted during the announcements of the Nobel Peace Prizes. Thus, the respondents were as-if randomly assigned to interviews immediately before or after the announcements of the Nobel Peace Prizes. This allows us to more rigorously analyze how the Prize affects public opinion across countries. Moreover, because the before-and-after comparison is potentially problematic (e.g., since the Nobel Peace Prize is always announced on Friday, we might compare respondents interviewed on weekdays and weekends), we extend it to so-called difference-in-differences, where we compare the Nobel Peace Prizes awarded to women’s rights activists and those awarded to other groups or individuals. This effectively addresses remaining concerns. Our sample includes 8,028 respondents in 14 countries between 2006 and 2020.

The analysis indicates that when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to women’s rights activists, it increased the confidence in women’s organizations by 0.148 points, which corresponded to a more than 160% increase from the sample average. The effect persisted for five days after the announcement of the Prizes. Interestingly, the change was driven by respondents who held traditional gender values. While the Prize increased other respondents’ confidence in women’s organizations, the effect size was more than doubled for conservative respondents. This implies that the Prize pressured conservative people to amend their gender attitudes.

We further investigate whether the Nobel Peace Prize also brought more tangible changes. To this end, we extract the event data of violence against women and analyze whether awarding the Prize to women’s rights activists reduced it. By using a similar difference-in-differences approach, we find that when the Prize was awarded to women’s rights activists, it reduced violence against women by 0.5 percentage points, which is equivalent to a 38% decrease from the sample average. This implies that the Nobel Peace Prize not only alters public opinion, but it also comes with substantive changes. However, an important caveat is that the effect did not last for long; the frequency of violence against women reverted to the previous rate within one or two weeks.

Impacts of Symbolic Actions

These findings provide a balanced view toward symbolic actions. The symbolic actions—Nobel Peace Prize—alter people’s perception of women’s rights activists across the world. They also reduced violence against women. However, the effects were short-lived, necessitating further policy measures for durable changes. Thus, it is probably better to consider that symbolic actions create windows of opportunity; policy makers, for instance, can exploit the short-term changes to gain popular support for new policy measures. It is a task of future studies to further explore the political consequences and policy implications of symbolic actions.

Author’s Note

This column is based on Kikuta, Kyosuke, and Manaho Hanayama. 2024. “The Nobel Peace Prize Increased the Global Support for Women’s Organizations: Prize and Praise in International Relations.” Perspectives on Politics October: 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724001142.

References

Barry, Colin M., K. Chad Clay, and Michael E. Flynn. 2013. “Avoiding the Spotlight: Human Rights Shaming and Foreign Direct Investment.” International Studies Quarterly 57 (3): 532–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/isqu.12039.

Hafner-Burton, Emilie M. 2008. “Sticks and Stones: Naming and Shaming the Human Rights Enforcement Problem.” International Organization 62 (4): 689–716.

Murdie, Amanda, and Dursun Peksen. 2015. “Women and Contentious Politics: A Global Event-Data Approach to Understanding Women’s Protest.” Political Research Quarterly 68 (1): 180–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912914563547.

Author's Profile

Kyosuke Kikuta is an Associate Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Developing Economies (Ph.D. of Government, the University of Texas at Austin). His research interest is in the quantitative analysis of conflict. His articles are published or forthcoming in the Journal of Politics, International Organization, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Political Science Research and Methods among others.

* Thumbnail photo: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP (Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
** The views expressed in the columns are those of the author(s) and do not represent the views of IDE or the institutions to which the authors are attached.

©2025 Kyosuke KIKUTA

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