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As active involvement in protest has been legitimized as an acceptable form of political activity, citizens’ protest potential has become an important measure to understand contemporary democratic politics. However, the arbitrary use of a forced-choice question, which prevents those who have previously participated in protests from expressing willingness to engage in future protest, and the limited coverage of international surveys across countries and years have impeded comparative research on protest potential. This research develops a new systematic weighting method for the measurement of protest potential for comparative research. Using the 1996 International Social Survey Program survey, which asks two separate questions about “have done” and “would do” demonstrations, I create a weighting scale for the forced-choice question by estimating the predicted probabilities of protest potential for those who have already participated in demonstrations. Capitalizing on the survey data recycling framework, this study also controls for harmonization procedures and the quality of surveys, thereby expanding the cross-national and temporal coverage beyond the affluent Western democracies. The results show that this weighting scale provides a valid measure of protest potential, and the survey data recycling framework improves comparability between surveys.
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How to Capture Global Protest Trends: Using Survey Data Recycling Data to Construct Cross-National Trends in Protest
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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- Award ID(s):
- 1738502
- PAR ID:
- 10250180
- 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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