Abstract
The investigation of long-term trends in contentious politics relies heavily on protest event analysis based on newspaper reports. This tends to be problematic in restricted media environments. To mitigate the effects of bias and (self-)censorship, researchers of protest in authoritarian regimes have experimented with other sources such as international media and dissident websites. However, even though classical news media are easier targets for repression, journalistic reports might still outperform other sources regarding the quality of information provided. Although these advantages and disadvantages are known in the literature, different types of sources have seldom been tested against each other in an authoritarian context. Using the example of Russia between 2007 and 2012, the present article systematically compares protest event data from English-language news agencies, dissident websites, and several local sources, first and foremost with a view to improving methodological knowledge. The analysis addresses broad trends across time and space as well as the coverage of specific regions and single protest events. It finds that although the data sources paint different pictures of protest in Russia, this divergence is systematic and can be put to productive use. The article closes with a discussion on how its findings can be applied in other contexts.
Highlights
Protest event analysis is one of the most important and widespread methods to investigate social movements and protest cycles on a large scale; the insights drawn from it can only be as good as the data on which it is based
On the exam‐ ple of protest in Russia between 2007 and 2012, I com‐ pare data sourced from international news agencies (Weidmann & Rød, 2019), data extracted from dissi‐ dent websites (Lankina, 2018; Robertson, 2013), and data from various local sources, including journalism and official accounts (Semenov, 2017)
Herkenrath and Knoll (2011) have found sub‐ stantial differences in protest coverage when compar‐ ing international and national news media sources— differences that I expect to show in the analysis: H1) Since Mass Mobilization in Autocracies Database (MMAD) is based on international media and imposes a 25‐person threshold, it will focus on larger and more visible events, which results in a different distribution of events when compared to Lankina Russian Protest Event Dataset (LAruPED) and IKD
Summary
Protest event analysis is one of the most important and widespread methods to investigate social movements and protest cycles on a large scale; the insights drawn from it can only be as good as the data on which it is based. On the exam‐ ple of protest in Russia between 2007 and 2012, I com‐ pare data sourced from international news agencies (Weidmann & Rød, 2019), data extracted from dissi‐ dent websites (Lankina, 2018; Robertson, 2013), and data from various local sources, including journalism and official accounts (Semenov, 2017). This is not an effort to expose flaws and biases in the different data sets. For case study research that focuses on single events, there seems to be no way around utilizing a diverse set of local sources
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