One Index to Rule Them All! Quantifying Social Movement Theories

• In Event: New Methods in Comparative Politics and International Relations

Abstract

Can we predict social movement related upheavals in modern societies? In this paper, we argue that social movement related upheavals can be better predicted by quantifying the three main components of Social Movement Theories (SMT): Political Opportunity Structure (POS), Resource Mobilization Theories (RMT), and Cultural Framing (CF). As a first step in this endeavour, we establish a roadmap for the quantification of these three theories and their aggregation into one central index. We engage in the first step of this roadmap by focusing on RMT: we develop a measure of the resource mobilization capacities of social movements in the United States and Canada based on Twitter data. We show that two specific lexicons appropriately capture the principal components of resource mobilization tweets and tweets about protests in these two countries. To be sure, more remains to be done to construct a holistic measure of RMT. But our findings matter as they show that Twitter data can match very well social movement related upheavals in the United States of America and Canada.

Authors

• Amir Abdul Reda, University of Toronto

• Semuhi Sinanoglu, University of Toronto