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Social movement scholars use protest events as a way to quantify social movements and have most often used large, national newspapers to identify those events. This has introduced known and unknown biases into our measurement of social movements. We know that national newspapers tend to cover larger and more contentious events and organizations. Protest events are furthermore a small part of what social movements actually do. Without other readily available options to quantify social movements, however, big-N studies have continued to focus on protest events via a few large newspapers. With advances in digitized data and computational methods, we now no longer have to rely on large newspapers or focus only on protests to quantify important aspects of social movements. In this paper, we use the environmental movement as a case study, analyzing data from a wide range of local, regional, and national newspapers in the United States to quantify multiple facets of social movements. We argue that the incorporation of more data and new methods to quantify information in text has the potential to transform the way we both conceive of and measure social movements in three ways: (1) the type of focal social movement organization included, (2) the type of tactics and issues covered, and (3) the ability to go beyond protest events as the primary unit of analysis. In addition to demonstrating ways that the focus on counting protest events has introduced specific biases in the type of tactics, issues, and organizations covered in social movement research, we argue that computational methods can help us extract and count meaningful aspects of social movements well beyond event counts. In short, the infusion of new data and methods into social movements, peace, and conflict studies could lead us to a substantial shift in the way we quantify social movements, from protest events to everything that occurs outside of them.

Scholarship on the effects of various kinds of state repression (e.g., counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, protest policing) on subsequent dissent has produced a body of contradictory findings. In an attempt to better understand the effects of one form of state repression – protest policing – on one form of dissent – public protest – this paper examines the effects of various policing strategies used at protest events on subsequent protest levels in the United States between 1960 and 1990. Theoretically, we argue the effects of repression cannot be broadly theorized but instead need to be hypothesized at the level of particular police strategies and actions. We theorize and empirically examine the impacts of five police strategies, while also improving on prior analyses by producing a comprehensive model that examines lagged and nonlinear effects and examines the effects across the entire social movement sector, as well as across two specific movement industries. Results (1) confirm that not all police strategies have the same effects; (2) show that policing strategies tend to have predominately linear effects; (3) show that police actions have their strongest effects in the very short term, with few effects detectable after a few weeks; and (4) point to interesting differences in the effects of policing strategies on subsequent protest across different social movements.

This research explores how protest events can change and develop over time, through an analysis of stakeholder perceptions of the EXIT festival in Serbia. In doing this, it builds on previous research into protest events from a critical events studies perspective and has implications for the management and understanding of events linked to social movements.

This research took a neo-institutionalist perspective and is based on 18 stakeholder interviews, which were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Purposive sampling in the highly-networked city of Novi Sad, Serbia, allowed for the inclusion of diverse participants from politics, NGOs, media and the festival itself.

The findings reveal that the EXIT festival has departed significantly from its original protest roots. Although it is now perceived as part of the dominant political culture in Serbia, it still has the potential to campaign on issues of relevance to the region, which is unrealised. This research demonstrates that the neo-institutionalist perspective can offer fresh insights for research into protest events. Taking this perspective suggests practical implications for the managers of events with protest roots and for social movements seeking to use protestival-style methods to achieve social change.

This paper provides a new theoretical perspective on protest events and proposes a new model that can be used in future research into protest events that persist over time. It also suggests implications for the management and development of protest events within social movements.

Social movements are made up of organized groups and individuals working together to accomplish shared objectives. Under what circumstances do active groups build and break their coalitions? Five conditions have been identified in the literature as influencing coalition formation: common identity, resources, organizational structure, historical connection, and institutional setting. Whereas coalition dynamics within a movement wave are best understood in terms of institutional opportunities and threats, further research is needed to determine how and to what extent these contextual elements influence coalitions. This chapter examines how threats posed by indiscriminate and selective repression affect the shape and structure of interorganizational coalitions during the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protests in Hong Kong. The analysis relies on an original political event dataset and an organization-event network dataset. These datasets were produced utilizing syntactic event coding techniques based on Telegram posts, which Hong Kong protesters used to distribute information, plan future actions, and crowdsource news. Furthermore, Telegram provides detailed information about state activities, event-level coalitions, and violent groups, which is difficult to access from other sources. This study investigates the coalition networks across the movement's four stages, each of which was marked by a particular type and degree of repression. The findings indicate that indiscriminate and selective repression have varied effects on coalition networks. A wide coalition disintegrates as a result of indiscriminate repression. Selective repression, however, leads to the formation of coalitions around activist groups targeted by repression.

In recent years, brands have increasingly engaged in corporate political advocacy (CPA; also termed brand activism or corporate sociopolitical activity) by taking positions on polarizing sociopolitical issues. Recent experimental research suggests that consumers respond to CPA based on its alignment with their own values, and that it typically induces an overall negative response. This study aims to provide additional insights by exploring consumer brand perceptions following CPA.

An event study of 106 CPA events and weekly consumer brand perception data was conducted. A regression model was used to investigate the moderating effects of CPA effort, concurrence and the strength of the online protests evoked by the CPA.

The results show that CPA had a negative effect on consumers’ brand perceptions and that the effect was stronger for customers relative to non-customers. The negative effect was attenuated by CPA concurrence and amplified by effort. Additionally, online protests were driven by the CPA effort and had a strong negative effect on brand perception. Online protests were stronger in the past, and, in turn, the negative effects of CPA on brand perceptions have slightly weakened in recent years.

This study contributes to the existing literature by highlighting the role of online protests following CPA and distinguishing consumer and customer responses. This study also provides converging evidence of the moderating effects of effort and concurrence identified in previous studies.

Measuring the diffusion of protests, or more generally, the diffusion of events, is an ongoing task in social sciences. This paper proposes an inter-event approach to study what types of protests tend to diffuse or decline. We develop a standardized, five-step procedure to measure what we define as “event diffusion momentum” (EDM): (1) employ event-based data containing information on the time, location, and features of each protest; (2) define the temporal and spatial ranges of interest; (3) for each observation, count the number of events before and after it within the defined ranges; (4) predict the numbers of post-event and pre-event protests with appropriate count models; (5) calculate the ratios of predicted values for each predictor and confidence intervals using the delta method. The ratio is the EDM. Applying this method to Dynamics of Collective Action (DoCA) data, we identify several micro- and macro-level factors associated with protest diffusion in the United States, 1960–1995. We conclude with the implications and generalizability of the proposed method.

Scholars agree that institutional and non-institutional (i.e., protest) politics are increasingly interrelated. One expression of this phenomenon is party protest – when leaders, activists, or sympathizers of political parties participate in protest events and identify themselves as such. Yet we know little about how often parties partake in protests, which ones do so, and under which conditions. Using data on more than 2,300 protest events in Chile between 2000 and 2012, I show that party protest takes place in only 6% of all protest events, and that it is essentially monopolized by leftist parties. Additionally, by combining several strands of the literature on political parties and collective action, I derive hypotheses about the impact of the features of protest events and the broader national context on the chances of party protest. Multivariate regression models show that party protest is more likely in events which take place in highly visible locations and are coordinated by other civil society organizations. Additionally, party protest occurs when the center-left coalition is in power and when collective protest at the national-level is less intense and less transgressive.

On 18 March 2015, the transnational anti-austerity Blockupy coalition protested the inauguration of the new European Central Bank premises in Frankfurt. The purpose of this paper is to analyse this mass protest event by highlighting the organizational differences, possibilities, and conflicts that was involved.

The paper is based on participant observation of the Blockupy event and interviews with a group of Danish activists who also participated.

The paper constructs sociospatial narrative that unfolds through three different scales of organization: the Blockupy coalition, the participating formal and informal organizations, and the activist subject. This narrative explicates the mode of organization as a “convergence space” (cf. Routledge, 2003), with different “roots” and “routes” of organization (cf. Davies, 2012).

Thus, through an analysis of the modes of organization constituting this mass protest event, this paper restates the relevance of the concept of organization, which have recently been ignored or understated in favour of master-narratives of networks or the dichotomy of horizontalism and verticality. It concludes by posing a set of questions for further discussion among both activists and sociologists.

This paper analyzes the relationship between the Chilean student movement and state force action during the period 2000–2012, placing specific attention on three waves of student contention that took place at the turn of the century. During the decade under study, the Chilean students became more contentious, they broadened their demands beyond specific grievances to encompass a critique to the education system as a whole, their alliance system grew (gaining from these denser networks of collaboration more resources to mobilize), and they managed to win public opinion on their side. However, the relationship with state forces has not been static across time, and both students and state forces have experienced changes in how they interact with each other. The results of this paper are based on a mixed method approach that drew on a quantitative database of student contention in Chile (n = 491 student events) and 15 in-depth interviews with leader activists from the most salient recent Chilean student movements of three periods under study, in addition to some key informants. The findings confirm that when student protests target the government, when they use disruptive strategies that affect the status-quo, and when they mobilize alongside other challenging actors, they are more likely to be met with direct repression by authorities. The research shows that there is a “dialect of repression” at play by which state forces' direct repression of protest can be two-fold: on the one hand, it gives students visibility in the public opinion, but on the other, it can be negative for ushering support if the media and authorities are successful in portraying them as violent or a threat to public order. In this sense, the figure of the “encapuchado,” students who disguise their identity and purposefully seek confrontation with authorities during mobilizations is problematized by the movement itself. How to win public opinion and use that visibility in their favor is related to decision-making mechanisms that the movement puts at play but also to the calculations done on the part of the government and security forces about the leverage of the movement.

Hunger strikes have a long history in efforts to achieve social change but scholars have made few comparative, empirical, or theoretical contributions to understanding their dynamics and connections in the social movement and nonviolent action literature. We examine hunger strikes from 1906 to 2004 with a comparative perspective, elaborating on its use as a tactic of nonviolent change. Using data assembled from the New York Times, Keesing's Worldwide Online, and The Economist we analyze how, when, where, and why hunger strikes occur, and by whom they have been utilized to seek change. In general, findings reveal that hunger strikes over the last century have been widespread phenomena that are typically small, brief, and relatively successful tactics against the state. Several themes emerge regarding hunger strikes including their appeal to the powerless and emergence when few political opportunities exist, their significance for third-party mobilization, and the role of emotions in the protest dynamics. Taken together, the power struggle involving the hunger strike is an important example and extension of “political jiu-jitsu” as presented by Sharp (1973).