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A common claim about the affluent democracies is that protest is trending, becoming more legitimate and widely used by all political contenders. In the new democracies, protest is seen as having contributed to democratization, but growing apathy has led to protest decline while in authoritarian regimes protest may be spurring more democratization. Assessing these ideas requires comparative trend data covering 15 or more years but constructing such data confronts problems. The major problem is that the most available survey item asks “have you ever joined (lawful) demonstrations,” making it difficult to time when this protest behavior occurred. We advance a novel method for timing these “ever” responses by focusing on young adults (aged 18-23 years), who are likely reporting on participation within the past 5 years. Drawing on the Survey Data Recycling harmonized data set, we use a multilevel model including harmonization and survey quality controls to create predicted probabilities for young adult participation (576 surveys, 119 countries, 1966-2010). Aggregating these to create country-year rate estimates, these compare favorably with overlapping estimates from surveys asking about “the past 5 years or so” and event data from the PolDem project. Harmonization and survey quality controls improve these predicted values. These data provide 15+ years trend estimates for 60 countries, which we use to illustrate the possibilities of estimating comparative protest trends.
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Innovative Methods in the Study of Protest: Editor’s Introduction
This special issue examines innovative methods in three areas of protest studies: (1) survey methodology and scaling, (2) the development and assessment of political event data, and (3) methods of contextual analysis. The articles provide new techniques and general methodologies for improving the quality of data that we have about protest, especially in the comparative study of protest.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1738502
- PAR ID:
- 10241729
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Behavioral Scientist
- ISSN:
- 0002-7642
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- Article No. 000276422110216
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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