Social media have provided instrumental means of communication in many recent political protests. The efficiency of online networks in disseminating timely information has been praised by many commentators; at the same time, users are often derided as "slacktivists" because of the shallow commitment involved in clicking a forwarding button. Here we consider the role of these peripheral online p...

The claims-making behavior of ethnopolitical communities spans three primary forms—electoral party politics, social movement protest behavior, and violent rebellion. In this study we posit that the three forms constitute a scale of increasingly contentious activity; where politically feasible, communities that give rise to the most intense forms of political behavior will also tend to be engage...

American South in the spring of 1960 transformed the struggle for racial equality. Sociological investigation began within months of the f irst protest (Laue [1966] 1989; Oppenheimer 1963; Searles and Williams 1962; Wehr 1960), and the sit-ins have become an exemplary case in the literature on social movements (Killian 1984; McAdam 1982, 1983; McAdam and Sewell 2001; Morris 1981, 1984; Oberscha...

In countries where citizens have strong grievances against the regime, attempts to address these grievances in the course of daily life are likely to entail high costs coupled with very low chances of success in any meaningful sense; consequently, most citizens will choose not to challenge the regime, thus reflecting the now well-known collective action problem. When a regime commits electoral ...

Motivated by the unusual patterns and dynamics of the Arab Spring, we construct a model explaining the vulnerability of the newly established incumbent to popular unrest. Using this model for the case of similar protests in Ukraine, we find that the current combination of availability of information, military capacity of the incumbent and his radicalization, together with the opportunity costs ...

This study assesses the relationship between two well-established sets of frames to better understand news coverage massive political protests. By relying on Semetko and Valkenburg’s generic McLeod Hertog’s protest frames, this aims identify whether certain emphasized in stories increase tendency delegitimize movements. To end, we analyzed Chile’s Estallido Social, a series demonstrations that ...

Despite considerable theoretical work in social sciences, ready to use resources are very limited compared to digitally available mass media resources. Thus, this project creates a political protest database from online news resources in Brazil that will be used to explain Brazilian welfare state policy changes. In this paper we present the preliminary results of a system that automatically cra...