Abstract
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.
Highlights
As protest has been legitimized as a form of political participation in recent decades, protest has become an essential element in the political processes of Western democracies (Kriesi et al, 1995; Meyer & Tarrow, 1998)
Research on protest potential has relied on international surveys to measure and analyze willingness for future protests, but both a measurement of protest potential and a comparative research method for the harmonized data remain underdeveloped
This article examined a new weighting scale for the protest potential measure to address the limitation of a forced-choice survey item that prevents respondents who declared past participation from expressing their willingness for future protests
Summary
As protest has been legitimized as a form of political participation in recent decades, protest has become an essential element in the political processes of Western democracies (Kriesi et al, 1995; Meyer & Tarrow, 1998). Given the previous research on differential protest potential by individual- and county-level features, I estimate a multilevel logistic model for the cross-level interaction of the sociodemographic variables for gender, age, and education and the country indicator of democratic history after restricting the sample to those who have participated in demonstrations. The practical intersurvey differences of these aggregate measures are treated as unmeasured errors that might be inherent in properties of the question in the surveys or might occur during the fieldwork and data processing (Slomczynski & Tomescu-Dubrow, 2019) This analysis tests whether the harmonization and survey quality control variables adjust for the intersurvey variability, using the sample restricted to country-years that have multiple surveys. The impact of the SDR control variables on intersurvey variability can be identified by a change in ICCs between a null model and a constrained model that adjust for the effect of the controls
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
