30220

The dynamics of protest politics

Swen Hutter

Kommentar

Protests and social movements are a crucial part of contemporary political processes, as demonstrated by historical and recent examples such as the movements of 1968, the Monday demonstrations before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the movements of the squares in the early 2000s, and the global climate justice protests. These cases highlight the diversity in action repertoires, participants, and goals of protest movements that have attracted media attention and shaped politics in recent decades.

This research seminar aims to provide an overview of the study of protest politics in Western and Latin American democracies through the lens of the Protest Event Analysis (PEA) methodology. PEA is a form of quantitative content analysis that aims to trace the occurrence and type of protest events—ranging from classical public demonstrations to more symbolic and confrontational events, including political violence—based on text and video sources, primarily newspaper articles. The seminar addresses several key questions: First, why is it important to study protest events, and what can we learn from them using the PEA methodology? How can we conduct a PEA in social science research, and what are the advantages, challenges, and pitfalls of using PEA? What insights have we gained in political sociology and contentious politics studies in the past decades through the implementation of PEA? Second, what steps are necessary to conduct a PEA independently? Which PEA and PEA-like datasets are available for use in answering substantively relevant questions? What are the new advances and future prospects of PEA in computational social sciences?

Based on foundational theoretical input, students will also learn how to implement established quantitative methods, such as advances in text-as-data, machine learning, and experimental approaches, to analyze and integrate with PEA. Alongside the theoretical and methodological sessions, students will develop and conduct their own research projects on the dynamics of protest politics in contemporary societies, utilizing either existing protest event datasets or original data collections.

Please note that participants need a solid intermediate background in statistical modeling and should be proficient in either Stata or R. These skills will be assessed in the first session of the class.

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Literaturhinweise

Hutter, Swen (2014). Protest event analysis and its offspring. In: della Porta, Donatella (ed.). Methodological practices in social movement research. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 335-367.