Collective Action Events Research Articles

Protest and repression in China’s digital surveillance state

ABSTRACT Autocrats around the world are making unprecedented investments in new, digital surveillance technologies to monitor their societies as well as to identify and repress pockets of dissent. Using an original dataset of local procurement of digital surveillance technologies, merged with micro-data on collective action events, I examine the logic and motivation for the digital surveillance buildup in China, the bellwether of digital dictatorships. I find that localities do indeed tend to allocate increased spending for digital surveillance in response to high volumes of collective action. Why citizens protest appears to be of less concern: protest claims do not have a significant impact on digital surveillance spending. However, how citizens protest makes a great deal of difference: more violent protests prompt significantly higher levels of investment in digital surveillance. This study’s findings have important implications for understanding autocrats’ evolving strategies of control in the digital age.

Solidarity Through Difference? How Italian and Spanish LGBTQIA* Organizations Frame Solidarity Through an Intersectional Lens

ABSTRACT Although Western-based LGBTQIA* mobilizations have often been considered rather internally fragmented and isolated from other movements, recent investigations show that LGBTQIA* organizations have increasingly addressed multiple discriminations and built solidarity ties with communities coping with various inequality structures – such as race, class, and dis/abilities. This article addresses this puzzle by analyzing how political solidarity was framed by Spanish and Italian LGBTQIA* organizations during the 2011–2020 decade, paying particular attention to the nexus between diagnostic framing and solidarity discourses. To do so, this article examines the collective action events published on Facebook by LGBTQIA* organizations based in Milan and Madrid. Results show that, while LGBTQIA* actors dealt with cross-sectional issues in both cities, they differently framed problems and articulated diverse solidarity discourses.

CASM: A Deep-Learning Approach for Identifying Collective Action Events with Text and Image Data from Social Media

Protest event analysis is an important method for the study of collective action and social movements and typically draws on traditional media reports as the data source. We introduce collective action from social media (CASM)—a system that uses convolutional neural networks on image data and recurrent neural networks with long short-term memory on text data in a two-stage classifier to identify social media posts about offline collective action. We implement CASM on Chinese social media data and identify more than 100,000 collective action events from 2010 to 2017 (CASM-China). We evaluate the performance of CASM through cross-validation, out-of-sample validation, and comparisons with other protest data sets. We assess the effect of online censorship and find it does not substantially limit our identification of events. Compared to other protest data sets, CASM-China identifies relatively more rural, land-related protests and relatively few collective action events related to ethnic and religious conflict.

CASM: A Deep-Learning Approach for Identifying Collective Action Events with Text and Image Data from Social Media:

Protest event analysis is an important method for the study of collective action and social movements and typically draws on traditional media reports as the data source. We introduce collective ac...

Organizing collective action: Does information and communication technology matter?

In recent years, there have been significant changes in the fields of collective action and political activism. The increasing use of ICTs in social interactions has facilitated informal ways of organizing and affected the participation, emergence, and organizing of conflictual and consensual collective actions. In this study we seek to understand how the integrated use of multiple ICTs, that is the ICT ensemble, affects the organizing of consensual collective action. We investigated the ICT ensembles used by two civic movements that successfully organized large-scale consensual collective action events in two European countries. In our results, we reveal how ICT ensembles constrained and facilitated the organizing functions and requirements of collective action. The findings show that ICTs allow organizers to operate purposefully in order to organize collective action, but the extent to which they succeed in the actual concretization of collective action actually depends on their capacities and intents. Therefore, we argue that human factors (that is, their resourcefulness and agency) are greatly implicated in the success of collective action supported by ICTs. This study extends the research on impact of technology-enabled collective action by looking at the combined use of multiple ICTs and examining the rare and overlooked phenomenon of consensual collective action.

#publicrelations on Twitter: Pushers, Talkers, Influencers on Spamming PR and Job Hunting

<p>A space generally associated with marketers and breaking news (Hobsbawn, 2009 cited in Evans, Twomey & Talan, 2011), Twitter has also become a space debate, community building and legitimization for companies and social movements alike. The academic literature has seen a rise in interest in the micro-blogging platform. For instance, Adi and Moloney (2012) assess the strategic uses of Twitter by protest groups, Adi, Erickson and Lilleker (2014) reflect on the networks and use pattern of the same platform by politicians, namely UK Labor party representatives in the House of Lords while Adi and Grigore (2015) analyze the strategic uses of social media by corporations. Bajpai and Jaiswal (2011) on the other hand propose a framework for analyzing collective action events on Twitter and so do the creators behind visual analysis platforms like NodeXL, Gephi, Linkurious and Socioviz. Public Relations research too has provided several reflections and analyses of Twitter. Verhoeven et al (2012) and Sweetsner and Kelleher discuss how practitioners use social media; Lovejoy, Waters and Saxton evaluate how NGO are engaging stakeholders though the new medium, while Saffer, Sommerfeldt and Taylor (2013) suggest that Twitter interactivity influences the quality of organization–public relationships. With questions about the professionalization of Public Relations as well as about the portrayals and perceptions of the profession continuing to intrigue researchers, it is surprising that only Xifra and Grau (2010) looked into the type of information shared in tweets about public relations. Using the Twitter data collection and analysis option from Socioviz this paper provides an exploratory account of the #publicrelations on Twitter. Using the visualizations provided by the platform and automated data analysis to gain insight into over 10,000 tweets published during June 15-24 and July 15-24, this paper qualitatively assesses the emerging themes about public relations focusing on association of hashtags and type of messages shared and identifies the most active and most influential users within the issue topic. The paper reveals that the #publicrelations is often associated with #jobs or is hijacked and associated with tags such as #gossip or #entertainment. The paper also shows that conversation in the #publicrelations issue network is limited and that the hashtag only partially includes content relevant to the practice. In doing so the paper raises important questions about the nature of dialogue and symmetry on social media and their assessment and suggests that further research should explore twitter chats as well as continue to apply similar data collection methods as used for the study.</p>

The Critical Periphery in the Growth of Social Protests.

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 participants, the immense majority of users who surround the small epicenter of protests, representing layers of diminishing online activity around the committed minority. We analyze three datasets tracking protest communication in different languages and political contexts through the social media platform Twitter and employ a network decomposition technique to examine their hierarchical structure. We provide consistent evidence that peripheral participants are critical in increasing the reach of protest messages and generating online content at levels that are comparable to core participants. Although committed minorities may constitute the heart of protest movements, our results suggest that their success in maximizing the number of online citizens exposed to protest messages depends, at least in part, on activating the critical periphery. Peripheral users are less active on a per capita basis, but their power lies in their numbers: their aggregate contribution to the spread of protest messages is comparable in magnitude to that of core participants. An analysis of two other datasets unrelated to mass protests strengthens our interpretation that core-periphery dynamics are characteristically important in the context of collective action events. Theoretical models of diffusion in social networks would benefit from increased attention to the role of peripheral nodes in the propagation of information and behavior.

The Urban Ethnic Community and Collective Action: Politics, Protest, and Civic Engagement by Hmong Americans in Minneapolis–St. Paul

This paper replicates and extends Sampson et al.'s (2005) collective efficacy explanation of civic action events to ethnic communities formed through international migration. It examines political, social movement, and civic collective action of Hmong Americans in Minneapolis–St. Paul through a content analysis of events reported in one of the community's ethnic newspapers from 2002 to 2011 (N = 541). Initially a dispersed group of refugees from Laos, by the early 2000s, 25 percent of all Hmong Americans lived in the Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan area. Most (68 percent) of their collective action is for civic engagement, not politics or protest. This civic engagement is mostly for socioeconomic improvement (53 percent) but also social solidarity (47 percent). As Sampson et al. found in Chicago, the spatial distribution of Hmong collective action is shaped more by the location of ethnic and public institutions than by ethnic residential concentration. The paper concludes that the analysis of collective action events in ethnic communities should combine social ecology, institutional, and interactional models.

This Is the Time of Tension

Greece has been one of the countries which most severely suffered the consequences of the global economic crisis during the past two years. It has also been a country with a long tradition of protest. The present paper reports a study in which we examined the ways in which people talk about subjective power and deal with the outcome of collective action in the context of defeat. Subjective power has recently become a prominent field of research and its link to collective action has been studied mainly through the concept of collective efficacy. The current study explored questions based on recent social identity accounts of subjective power in collective action. We examined participants’ experiences of subjective power before and after Mayday 2012, in Greece. Two different collective action events took place: a demonstration against austerity and a demonstration to support steel workers who were on strike. In total, 19 people were interviewed, 9 before the demonstrations and 10 after. Thematic analysis was carried out. Protest participants talked about power in terms of five first-order themes: the necessity of building power, unity, emotional effects, effects of (dis)organization, and support as success. The steel workers we spoke to experienced the events more positively than the other interviewees and had different criteria for success. Theories of collective action need to take account of the fact that subjective power has important emotional as well as cognitive dimensions, and that definitions of success depend on definitions of identity.

Picturing Protest

Images of collective action shape public understanding of social movement campaigns and issues. Modern media includes more images than ever before, and these images are remembered longer and are more likely to elicit emotional responses than are textual accounts. Yet when it comes to media coverage of collective action, existing research considers only the written accounts. This means that little is known about the extent to which images of collective action events conform to or diverge from the “protest paradigm,” a pattern of reporting found in articles that tends to marginalize protesters and legitimizes authorities. The authors address this gap by analyzing newspaper photographs of one of the most significant recent cases of Indigenous-state conflict in North America—the 1990 “Oka Crisis.” This 78-day armed standoff between Indigenous peoples and Quebecois and Canadian authorities was sparked by the attempted expansion of a golf course onto Mohawk territory. The mass media produced thousands of articles and photographs in their coverage of the event. This article uses these photographs to assess the manner in which images frame collective action and collective actors. The authors find that images of collective action frame these events differently and in a more nuanced way than do textual accounts. For example, while challengers are just as likely to be shown in images of collective action, they are less likely to be specifically named. In addition, officials are more likely to be shown in dominant positions, but certain groups of officials (particularly government representatives) are also the most likely to be shown as emotional and angry. These findings illustrate the sometimes conflicting messages depicted in images of collective action.

¿El Campeón de Los Hispanos? Comparing the coverage of Latino/a collective action in Spanish- and English-language newspapers

Newspaper coverage of Latino collective action events is critical because it can shape how issues and problems are understood by policymakers and the larger public. There is an assumption that English- and Spanish-language newspapers will report on these events in different ways, but few studies have systematically explored these differences. In this article, we document and compare the coverage of Latino protest and civic engagement in English- and Spanish-language newspapers. Focusing on four metropolitan areas in 2000, we find that both types of newspapers cover nearly the same number of Latino collective action events, and although Spanish-language newspapers provide more thorough and in-depth coverage than English-language newspapers, the difference is slight. In fact, in some metropolitan areas, general-market English-language newspapers report on more events and provide more extensive coverage than Spanish-language newspapers, as evidenced by the inclusion of contextual information about the larger structural conditions that contribute to Latino organizers’ concerns or motivations. Our results show that Latino collective action events are visible within English-language newspapers, which signifies that the American mainstream is expanding its borders to include Latinos.

Using Social Network Analysis to Explore Social Movements: A Relational Approach

This paper uses a ‘relational’ approach to network analysis to demonstrate the linkages between different types of environmental organizations in London. A ‘relational’ approach was used to avoid problems associated with ‘positional’ approaches such as structural determinism, subjectively defined and misleadingly labelled blocks of ‘approximately’ equivalent actors, and reification of the action/issue basis of networks. The paper also explores definitions of social/environmental movements. Whilst broadly agreeing with Diani's consensual definition of a social movement, it argues that we need to be much more precise about the type and intensity of networking required; it must be more than informal or cursory, and should bind individuals and organizations into collaborative networks. Evidence from a survey of 149 environmental organizations and qualitative interviews with key campaigners suggests that whilst many organizations might share information, it is often stockpiled or ignored, hardly creating the kinds of network links that might lead to shared movement identity. The kinds of links that do bind movements are collaborative. In practice, in the environmental movement in London, conservationists tend neither to share information nor to engage in the collective action events of reformist or radical organizations, suggesting that conservationists should perhaps not be considered part of the movement.

Civil Society Reconsidered: The Durable Nature and Community Structure of Collective Civic Action

This article develops a conceptual framework on civil society that shifts the dominant focus on individuals to collective action events—civic and protest alike—that bring people together in public to realize a common purpose. Analyzing over 4,000 events in the Chicago area from 1970 to 2000, the authors find that while civic engagement is durable overall, “sixties‐style” protest declines, and hybrid events that combine public claims making with civic forms of behavior—what they call “blended social action”—increase. Furthermore, dense social ties, group memberships, and neighborly exchange do not predict community variations in collective action. The density of nonprofit organizations matters instead, suggesting that declines in traditional social capital may not be as consequential for civic capacity as commonly thought.

Identifying the Precipitants of Homeless Protest Across 17 U.S. Cities, 1980 to 1990

During the 1980s, homeless people formed social movement organizations and mobilized collective action events in cities across the U.S. From the vantage point of social movement theories and scholarship on homelessness, it is surprising that homeless protest was so prevalent in the 1980s. Yet we find evidence of homeless protest events across no fewer than 50 U.S. cities in the 1980-90 period. Drawing on social movement theories about the precipitants of mobilization, we examine the extent to which city-level contextual factors, and their change over time, affect variation in the frequency of homeless mobilization across 17 of these cities. Our findings reveal that a mix of factors congruent with strain and resource mobilization theories helps to account for variation in the frequency of homeless protest across U.S. cities in the 1980s.

Toward a Theory of Panethnicity: Explaining Asian American Collective Action

This analysis extends theoretical models of ethnic boundary formation to account for the shifting and layered nature of ethnic boundaries. It focuses on the underlying structural conditions that facilitate the expansion of ethnic boundaries or the construction of a pan-national identity, and explores how organizing along an ethnic boundary affects collective efforts at the panethnic level. Two processes could be occurring: (1) Competition with other ethnic or racial groups could lead groups with different national origins to engage in collective action based on a pan-national boundary, or (2) occupational segregation could foster pan-national interests and networks that lead groups to participate in pan-national collective action. Using a new longitudinal data set of collective action events involving Asian Americans, the analyses indicate that the segregation of Asians as a group raises the frequency of pan-national collective action, while the segregation among Asian subgroups depresses the rate of pan-Asian collective action. The results also show that intragroup competition discourages pan-Asian collective action, and organizing along ethnic lines generally facilitates it. Overall, these findings are consistent with the cultural division of labor theory, which suggests that segregation processes influence panethnic collective action due to intragroup interaction, common economic interests, and membership in a community of fate.