This paper analyzes the impact of changing political opportunities, and more particularly of changes in the composition of government, on the levels, political leaning and forms of protest mobilization. The literature provides us with contradictory expectations as to these questions, some stressing openess of the political system, some closure, and some a combination of openness and closure as ...

Communication scholars have articulated the concept of protest paradigm to capture the news media’s tendency to portray social protests as deviant, threatening, or impotent. Developments in the media and social environment have led to more diversified media representations of protests, however. Correspondingly, scholars have started to treat the protest paradigm as a variable. Extending this li...

A supporter of a candidate for office may wish to restrict her power or to send her a message by casting a protest vote against her. A sufficiently large protest may convince the candidate to accept the protesters’ demands after winning the election; however, if the protest is too large then it risks causing the candidate to lose to a disliked opponent. I study a model of protest voting in whic...

This article identifies and examines the features of protest events in Ireland in the aftermath of the EU-IMF bailout in order to understand why the patterns of protest in Ireland have not mirrored those in the other EU countries that received bail outs. To identify characteristics of Irish protest I used contemporary newspaper articles to compile a database recording objective features of prot...

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...

Three studies examined the hypothesis that system justification is negatively associated with collective protest against ingroup disadvantage. Effects of uncertainty salience, ingroup identification, and disruptive versus nondisruptive protest were also investigated. In Study 1, college students who were exposed to an uncertainty salience manipulation and who scored higher on system justificati...

Social media has emerged to be a popular platform for people to express their viewpoints on political protests like the Arab Spring. Millions of people use social media to communicate and mobilize their viewpoints on protests. Hence, it is a valuable tool for organizing social movements. However, the mechanisms by which protest affects the population is not known, making it difficult to estimat...

This paper looks at the impact of Left victory and Left party alliance on the protest behavior of popular movements, based on an original dataset of protest in Mexico City, Brasilia, and São Paulo. I ask, first, whether Left victories reduce levels of protest, and second, whether party alliances constrain protest. My findings suggest that neither hypothesis is systematically correct. Organizati...