Protest Issues Research Articles

The Limits of Social Media Mobilization: How Protest Movements Adapt to Social Media Logic

The emergence of social networking sites offers protest movements new ways to mobilize for action and draw attention to their issues. However, relying on social media also creates challenges, as social media follow their own principles. If protest movements want to be visible in news feeds, they have to adapt to so-called social media logic, as originally postulated in mediatization research. The principles of social media have been conceptualized. However, there is a lack of empirical research on how political actors perceive and orient to this logic, how they learn about it, and the consequences for mobilization (i.e., communicating protest issues as well as taking protest action). As protest movements are an integral part of modern democracies, use social media somewhat intensively, and usually build on a fluid network structure that allows us to examine adaptation processes in greater detail, they are particularly suitable for addressing these questions. Semi-structured interviews with activists organizing protest actions or managing social media accounts from 29 movement organizations in Germany (<em>N</em> = 33) revealed that protest movements have internalized social media logic and paid attention to not only the design but also the timing of posts to suit algorithms. The protest organizations generally built on their experience with social media. The degree to which they followed these principles was based on available resources. Limits of this adaptation arose, for example, if sensitive or negative content rarely produced likes or, increasingly, personalization evoked a presumed hierarchy within the movements.

When Do Radical Flanks Use Violence? Conditions for Violent Protest in Radical Left-Libertarian Activism in Sweden, 1997–2016

ABSTRACT Descriptions of social movement factionalism are often based on the dichotomous conception of lawful moderates and violent radicals. In this article, we nuance this distinction by illustrating the complexity of radical flanks through an empirically grounded analysis of protest tactics, in which we ask under what conditions radical flanks are likely to use violent protest tactics. Exploring dominant explanations of political violence, the article shows the necessity of understanding the use of violent protest tactics as part of cognitive and relational processes. The use of violent tactics varies greatly across frames and protest issues, pointing to how different logics of protest are tied to different frames. Also, the use of violence is affected by the presence or absence of moderate allies; the likelihood of violence clearly decreases when radicals and moderates form coalitions when organising protests. The analysis is based on a protest event data set covering over 3,900 nonviolent and violent events by the Radical Left-Libertarian Movement in Sweden, 1997–2016. Notably, the results hold over this entire twenty-year period, suggesting that they are robust and provide a better explanation than historically contingent causes.

The Power of Indigenous Music: Ethnography, Resistance, and Protests

“The Power of Indigenous music: Ethnography, Resistance, and Protests” is a comprehensive study of the history of musical ethnography within the Indigenous topic, how it later affected Indigenous peoples, and how it is shown in popular music today. Throughout the era of musical ethnography, musical salvaging, and corrupted motives took place, and as a result, ethnography was an ever-changing field of anthropology. This history later encouraged Indigenous artists to express themselves in music and other art forms. The Hallcui Nation is used as a ‘case study’ to showcase how Indigenous artists have used various forms of art to express, resist, and protest issues within Indigenous communities caused by colonialism, while an in-depth understanding of ethnography in the musical topic is analyzed. The Halluci Nation is a Hip-Hop based group and their music is focused primarily on protest and resisting while educating their listeners on topics such as police brutality, colonialism, and topics on their communities and ways of understanding. Understanding this history is necessary, and is especially important in school systems of all grades. Within the institution of Queen’s University, and more specifically in the Bachelor of Music program, students are given an opportunity to learn about the music of all cultures and traditions, but usually, only specific cultures and traditions are centered in these discussions. Indigenous artists and musicians create powerful, artistic, soulful, and vulnerable pieces, and to truly understand how powerful they are one must understand the history of colonialism and musical ethnography in Canada.

The Sentiment Analysis of EndSARS Protest in Nigeria

The extraction of public opinions from online communication platforms can serve several purposes in corporate institutions, state politics, and governance. The analysis of these opinions may be useful for both immediate business decision making and professional planning. This analysis is becoming relevant in managing social movements and digital activism by applying computational technology. There is a need to deploy this opinion mining technology to the recent largest digital activism in Nigeria known as the #EndSARS movement. In this work, we proposed the EndSARS live analytics framework which holds a promising solution to social unrest and may serve as a panacea to curbing the menace of vandalism resulting from unresolved protest issues. Using a dataset of 12,357 tweets, we demonstrated that computational technology can be relevant to addressing online protests. The result of the analysis shows the eight basic emotions expressed during the protest and approaches the government may adopt to address future activisms.

Appropriating media coverage of protests: A framing analysis of the ‘Save Akamas’ campaign in national news

News coverage of protests typically employs a protest paradigm: framing strategies for marginalizing protest actors and reducing the significance of protest issues and aims. However, recent studies are detecting less prototypical media responses, indicating the need to identify the extent of application of the protest paradigm and the underlying determinants for variations within media politics of dissent. This analysis of the framing of a Cypriot environmental campaign ‘Save Akamas’ by three national newspapers indicated that the coverage deviated from the protest paradigm. The results showed little emphasis on social deviance but validation of the protests in varying magnitudes through frames articulating governmental responsibility, environmental conservation, and ambivalence towards economic grievances. Finally, supplemented with interviews with two protest organizers and journalists, respectively, this article examines the conditions under which citizen protests mitigate media spectacles through appropriating legitimation strategies.

Young Climate Protesters’ Mobilization Availability: Climate Marches and School Strikes Compared

Although there is a developing strand of literature on young people’s participation in environmental activism, there have been few systematic comparisons of their participation in different forms of environmental activism. This article compares the participation of young people and their older counterparts in climate change marches and Global Climate Strikes (GCSs). The agential and structural factors that draw people into protest participation are, in general terms, well recognized. However, it is also recognized that the factors that lead to particular types of protest on certain issues might not be the same as those that lead to different types of protest on different issues. In this article, we keep the protest issue constant (climate change), and make comparisons across different forms of climate protest (marches and school strikes). We coin the term “mobilization availability”, which is a useful way to understand why young people are differentially mobilized into different types of climate change protest. Our notion of mobilization availability invites scholars to consider the importance of the interplay of the supply and demand for protest in understanding who protests and why. We analyse data collected using standardized protest survey methodology (n = 643). In order to account for response rate bias, which is an acute problem when studying young people’s protest survey responses, we weighted the data using propensity score adjustments. We find that the youth-oriented supply of protest evoked by GCS mobilized higher numbers of young people into climate protest than did the more adult-dominated climate marches. GCS did this by providing accessible forms of protest, which reduced the degree of structural availability required to encourage young people to protest on the streets, and by emotionally engaging them. Indeed, the young people we surveyed at the GCSs were considerably more angry than their adult counterparts, and also angrier than young people on other climate protests. Our conceptual and empirical innovations make this paper an important contribution to the literature on young people’s political participation.

Thin-skinned leaders: regime legitimation, protest issues, and repression in autocracies

AbstractThe literature on autocracies has argued that repression of protest is either a result of the political environment in which protest occurs, or depends on particular characteristics of the protest events themselves. We argue that the interaction of both matters. Authoritarian regimes vary in how they legitimize their rule, and they should be particularly thin-skinned if protesters challenge the basis of their legitimacy. Using event-level data on mass mobilization in autocracies between 2003 and 2015, we use text classification methods to extract protest issues from newspaper reports. Our analysis shows that dictators are more likely to repress protest against incumbents when they claim legitimacy based on the person of the leader. Overall, our study shows that protest issues are not universal in triggering repression; rather, they need to be considered together with the political context in which they are raised.

Still Images—Moving People? How Media Images of Protest Issues and Movements Influence Participatory Intentions

While media images can ease political information perception and processing, the impact of images on behavioral intentions to engage in protest is relatively unexplored. We ask: Under what conditions can news images of protest “move” people and affect the willingness to participate? Aiming to answer this question from an information-processing perspective, we shed light on the nexus between spontaneous, sensory behavior and cognition in response to news media images of protest. We conducted a multigroup experiment in which 143 recipients were randomly exposed to four news images of protest and their visual attention monitored. Multilevel regressions indicate that viewers fixate on images of protest prior to accompanying texts. When exposed to protest images with a negative valence, an increase in the observation duration for protest images increases the recipient’s willingness to participate. Contrariwise, when viewing protest images with a positive valence, a longer observation duration does not increase participatory intentions. Irrespective of image valence, the greater the salience that viewers subjectively ascribed to the image, the greater their willingness to protest concerning the depicted issue. Our analysis also reveals a cross-level interaction effect indicating that the impact of image observation duration on the willingness to engage is conditional on individual levels of political interest: The positive effect of observing protest images on the willingness to protest is especially increased, if an individual is highly politically interested. These results indicate that, under certain conditions, media images are efficient carriers of political content that can motivate citizens to protest.

Protest Issues and Political Inequality in Latin America

Many studies reveal that socioeconomic resources increase protest participation, lending more political voice to the affluent and reinforcing preexisting political inequality. But existing studies ...

Protest Issues and Political Inequality in Latin America

Many studies reveal that socioeconomic resources increase protest participation, lending more political voice to the affluent and reinforcing preexisting political inequality. But existing studies ignore whether this holds across different protest issues. We argue that some issues reinforce political inequality, while other ones do not. We differentiate between survival protests—in which people react to direct threats to their material and social survival—and furtherance protests—which press authorities to make policy changes that seek to improve some aspect of society. Regression models with Latin American survey data show that people with higher socioeconomic status are overrepresented in furtherance protests, by implication reinforcing preexisting political inequality. However, survival protests attract people socioeconomically similar to national averages, contributing to a more balanced political field. Our results emphasize the need to reconsider the place of issues in the study of protest participation, political inequality, and political behavior in general.

Organizational Political Ideology and Corporate Openness to Social Activism

This paper argues that organizations tend to be more “open” or “closed” as a function of their members’ political ideologies and that this variation can help explain firms’ responses to social activism. Integrating research on social activism with political psychology, we propose that when firms experience activists’ protests, a liberal-leaning firm will be more likely to concede to activists’ demands than its conservative-leaning counterpart, because its decision makers will more readily accept the interconnectedness of the firm’s activities with the activists’ claims. Building on this core concept, we examine how factors that increase the salience of an organization’s ideology also amplify its effect on responses to protests. Based on a longitudinal sample of 558 protest events directed against Fortune 500 firms from 2001 to 2015, our results support the notion that liberal-leaning firms concede more to activism, an effect that exists after accounting for the ideological valence of the protest issues. When an organization’s members are more proximate to the corporate headquarters, this effect of its ideology is heightened. The same is true when the firm’s ideology is incongruent with that of its local community or its industry. These findings inform research on the organizational implications of political ideologies, as well as on social movements, institutional complexity, and non-market strategy.

Social media, temporality, and the legitimacy of protest

ABSTRACT This article examines how the rise of social media affects the temporal relations of protest communication. Following a relational approach, it traces how regimes of temporality are constructed and transformed through the entanglement between media infrastructures, institutions, and practices. These regimes involve particular ‘speeds’ -the rate at which media content is renewed – as well as ‘temporal orientations’ towards present, past, and future. The article questions how specific temporal regimes enable or complicate protestors’ efforts to gain public legitimacy. A large body of research suggests that it is difficult to gain such legitimacy in the mainstream news cycle, in which protest is primarily covered from an ‘episodic’ perspective, ignoring larger protest issues. The present analysis suggests that despite the participatory affordances of social media, it has not become any easier to generate sustained public attention for structural protest issues. Drawing examples from three case studies, it demonstrates that the dominant mode of social media protest communication reproduces and reinforces the episodic focus of the mainstream news. While other temporal perspectives on protest are certainly developed in the alternative and mainstream news, as well as in activist social media communication, these do not fundamentally challenge the prevailing temporal orientation towards the present, towards the event.

Street Demonstrations and the Media Agenda: An Analysis of the Dynamics of Protest Agenda Setting

This article argues that the agenda-setting power of protest must be understood in dynamic terms. Specifically, it develops and tests a dynamic theory of media reaction to protest which posits that features of street demonstrations—such as their size, violence, societal conflict, and the presence of a “trigger”—lead protest issues to be reported and sustained in the media agenda over time. We conduct a unique empirical analysis of media coverage of protest issues, based upon a data set of 48 large-scale street demonstrations in nine countries. Time-series cross-sectional analysis is used to estimate the dynamic effects of demonstration features on media coverage of the protest issue. The findings show that violence can increase media attention in the short term and larger protest size sustains it over the longer term. The agenda-setting power of protest is structured in time.

Party activism: the permeability of the asylum protest arena in Austria

ABSTRACTThis article contributes to the growing field of studies on party–protest linkages that highlight the dynamic nature, complementarity and fuzziness of the parliamentary arena and protest arena. Taking the policy field of asylum, it investigates, first, the conditions for the permeability of the protest arena for party activism and, second, the ways in which party activism shapes and transforms the protest arena. The empirical observations refer to Austria, which has a political framework with highly politicized immigration, strong political parties and a weak protest culture. Methodologically, the paper combines a protest event analysis with two in–depth case studies on protests. The authors argue that the openness of the asylum protest arena for parties is characterized by modest protest demands, and depends on the dominant political position as well as the decision making structure regarding the protest issue. The article demonstrates that pro-asylum protests are less open to political parties than anti-asylum protests, which are in tune with the dominant political position on asylum in Austria. The findings also show that anti–asylum protests are not only more likely to attract the involvement of political parties, but also tend to become instrumentalized for party–competitive ends. Pro–asylum protests, in contrast, keep their substantive, grievance–focused orientation even when political parties step in.

Protest in the Photo Essay: Following Tradition or Breaking New Ground?

The photo essay, a form of visual journalism that arose during the era of the picture magazines, has reemerged as a regular feature of global news channels, including CNN, BBC World, and, notably, Al Jazeera English, recognized for its live reporting of political unrest. In 2017, a year marked by protest around the world, AJE published over 200 photo-series, including 37 on public protest. An analysis based in a four-year study of protest on screen, revealed that these photo essays share characteristics that in turn distinguish them from video broadcasts of public protests. The photo-reportage on screen, like its classic forerunner in print, employs a variety of visual perspectives and focuses on participants who are often quoted and identified by name. Scenes of public protest are complemented by visual and textual reporting from the private/domestic sphere. This visual strategy, in contrast to the immediacy of video coverage from the streets, supports knowledge of the protest issue and engagement with its participants. Keywords: Al Jazeera English, global television news, news galleries, photo essay, photojournalism, public protest

What I Learned from Gay Country, Communist Disco, and a Choctaw Poet’s Sermon on Immigration

Protest and the Southern ImaginaryWhat I Learned from Gay Country, Communist Disco, and a Choctaw Poet’s Sermon on Immigration Brendan Greaves (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 6] folksingers and journalists As a kid—hell, for much of my adult life too, if I’m being honest—I hated so-called protest music. Weaned on a heady mix of postpunk and indie rock (which I discovered through fanzines, newsprint label mail order catalogs, local college radio, and all-ages shows in Boston and Providence) and classic postwar country, folk, and jazz (which I explored through my father’s dog-eared record collection), the songs and recordings I associated with “protest music” seemed to me ossified, defanged fossils of a bygone era—namely the 1960s, my parents’ generation. As a teenager, I revered Odetta and Nina Simone, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, but I somehow associated any overtly political material with “Kumbaya” singalongs and handholding, anemic acoustic guitars and campfires. I liked some deeply politicized contemporary bands like Dead Kennedys and Minor Threat and Public Enemy and the Ex, but, in retrospect, I was responding more to the anger and profanity, the aggressive sonic assault, than the actual political content, which I didn’t entirely digest. It’s not that I didn’t agree with the substance or the sloganeering, but rather that I found any explicit statements of political position in music gauche, even mildly embarrassing, for what I perceived as strenuous earnestness, stridency, and didacticism. The cloistered cultural corner of the 1990s that I blithely inhabited valued irony and detachment, a position I could afford to assume. Classic American vernacular protest music all sounded to me vaguely medicinal—prescriptive and proscriptive—and insufficiently veiled. All I could hear was sanctimonious self-righteousness, a hermetic resistance to criticism, and engagement that reeked of cloying clouds of church incense and represented to me the opposite of artistry, as if singing unequivocally about actual freedom precluded the exercise of artistic freedom (whatever that might be). I was a white boy living a sheltered, solipsistic, and privileged life in rural Massachusetts, in a family of middle-class Republicans, a provincial product of Catholic and Latin schools. Thick gray veins of ancient, tumbling stone walls ran through the broad woods around my house at the foot of a steep hill; my adolescent taste and my adolescent angst were equally impregnable. I knew nothing about protest. I knew nothing about the South, certainly. (I’ve lived in North Carolina for thirteen years now, and I’m still learning.) [End Page 7] “You’re not a folksinger, you’re a journalist,” Bob Dylan spat at Phil Ochs, before kicking him out of his limo, or so the legend goes. How brave and righteous of Blonde on Blonde Bob, I thought. How noble to value art above politics, to honor interiority over topicality, to keep those realms separate and discrete. I was wrong, reader; I was deaf. I grew up and joined the world, in which music fulfills a myriad of functions and needn’t remain segregated from political speech and action. The songwriter and organizer Si Kahn, whose interview appears in this issue, has succinctly expressed the ubiquity of politics in, and adjacent to, music, even when unintentional: Being “political” isn’t about being “politically correct,” or about taking particular stands. It should never be about having our art subsumed by the political. Rather, through our work, the political is made into art. Particular issues may come and go. But the art we create, individually and together, will persist, and will continue to move people, both into action and into a deeper place of consciousness and hope. All artists are political, whether we mean to be or not . . . If in your art you are silent about the challenging issues of our time, you have by your silence taken a political stand.1 The title of this special issue of Southern Cultures, “Music & Protest,” deploys language that is explicitly additive and equivalent instead of descriptive or possessive. “Protest Music” and “The Music of Protest” both struck me as too specific and constrained, too on the nose...

The Right to Protest and Direct Action

1. The issue of protest and direct action1 is becoming increasingly relevant. It has arisen most recently in relation to fracking and tree-felling but is occurring more often in a charged political...

Tax avoidance as an anti-austerity issue: The progress of a protest issue through the public sphere

Theorists of left and right agree that periods of crisis are fertile times at which to precipitate change. However, protesters on the periphery of the public sphere must overcome barriers, or what Habermas called ‘sluice gates’, if their discourse is to be publicly and politically influential. This study of newspaper discourse and activity in parliament and the public sphere over a 6-year period takes tax justice campaigning in the United Kingdom as a case study, and in particular protest group UK Uncut’s attempt to mobilise opposition to austerity by advocating a crackdown on tax avoidance as an alternative to cuts. It finds that while UK Uncut successfully amplified arguments previously raised by experts, trade unions and the left-leaning press, austerity barely figured in debate about tax avoidance once it was picked up by other actors in the public sphere on the other side of the ‘sluice gates’. The reasons for this were both structural and discursive, related to the role and interests of receptive ac...

Tracing Protest Motives: The Link Between Newspaper Coverage, Movement Messages, and Demonstrators’ Reasons to Protest

Within the social movement literature, it is mostly assumed that the reasons why people join a protest demonstration are in line with the collective action frames of the organizations staging the protest. Some recent studies suggest, however, that protesters’ motives are only partly aligned with the messages that are broadcasted by social movements. This study argues that activists’ motives are for an important part shaped by mass media coverage on the protest issue. It investigates the link between people's reasons to protest, the campaign messages of the protest organizers, and newspaper coverage prior to the demonstration. Data cover 14 anti‐austerity demonstrations in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Results show that social movements depend a lot on other political actors to gain media visibility for their messages. Furthermore, the relationship between social movement frames and protest participant motives is mediated by newspaper coverage. Protest organizers’ are able to reach demonstrators via their own communication channels to some extent, but for many of their messages, they also rely on journalists’ reporting about the protest issue.

Demonstrating Power

How do public opinion signals affect political representatives’ opinion formation? To date, we have only limited knowledge about this essential representative process. In this article, we theorize and examine the signaling strength of one type of societal signal: protest. We do so by means of an innovative experiment conducted among Belgian national and regional politicians. Elected officials were exposed to manipulated television news items covering a protest demonstration. Following Tilly’s previously untested WUNC claim, four features of the event were manipulated: the demonstrators’ worthiness, unity, numerical strength, and commitment. We argue that these protest features present elected officials with useful cues about what (a segment of) the public wants. We find that these cues affect elected officials’ beliefs. The salience they attach to the protest issue, the position they take, and their intended actions all change as a consequence of exposure. The size of a protest event (numbers) and whether the protesters agree among themselves (unity) are the most persuasive protest factors. The effects of the protest signals come on top of strong receiver effects. We find no evidence that elected officials’ predispositions moderate the effects of the protest features.