Information, Media, Technology & Mass Protest in Comparative Perspective

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

In recent years two phenomena have increasing preoccupied scholars and policy makers alike – the rise of mass protests and the rise of new technologies. This has specifically been a focus of those who study autocracies and democratizing contexts in eastern Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Recent studies have highlighted that we not only need to reconsider how we study new technologies and/or how we use them to study protest, but also, that we should employ comparative approaches to not only look across-space but also dissect the role of media on protest mobilization across-time. Meeting these calls, papers on this panel comparatively assesses the role of diverse technologies in both the process (as mechanisms of mobilization) and in the study (as data tools to measure/capture mobilization) of mass protest.

We start with a consideration of how new information communication technologies (ICTs) and the data they produce can help us track and trace mobilization. In their paper, Barrie and Frey propose a new method for estimating the distribution of ideological preferences in a protest crowd using Twitter data. We then move on to Stukal et. al., whoexamine whether social media bot activation is a response to offline protests or a reaction to domestic cyberconflicts. This is followed up with Santos and Onuch who’s paper examines the role of access to and consumption of online media in the unexpected mobilization of ‘lone wolf’ protesters. And we end our panel with a look back in time and critically assess, how much of the mechanisms attributed to new ICTs were actually present in factors related to information dissemination and network connectivity historically. Thus, Ketchley’s paper investigates how telegraph, telephone, postal, railway, and road networks shaped protest diffusion in the early twentieth century.

As we strongly believe that a comparative approach is central to theoretical, methodological and empirical innovation in political science, we have specifically sought out scholars who are researching trends of technologies and mass mobilization in different regions (USA, MENA, eastern Europe and Latin America). The authors have been asked to consider and place their cases in comparative perspective both at the inter-regional and intra-regional levels and consider temporality in their analyses.

This panel incorporates members of the "Competitive Authoritarian Protest Research Network” (CAPRN) - a new research network dedicated to advancing comparative investigation of empirical, methodological and theoretical questions around protest mobilization in competitive authoritarian, autocratic, and democratizing contexts. CAPRN brings together leading scholars in the field in of both contentious politics and comparative politics who have developed international acclaim for their study of protest and actively seek to support a new generation of scholars dedicated to studying contentious politics in comparative perspective.

We feel that this panel is a perfect fit with APSA’s 2020 theme of “Democracy, Difference, and Destabilization” as the proposed papers examine aspects connected to “antidemocratic tendencies” (Stukal et. al.), “polarization into ideological camps” (Barrie and Frey), as well as, analyse patterns in “how citizens react to democratic threats” and “agitate to gain or maintain rights” (Santos and Onuch, Barrie and Frey, and Ketchley).

This panel has good mix of purposefully selected PhD Students, early-career, mid-career, and senior scholars. The panel organizers have also actively sought a good gender balance among participants. Finally, the panel features the work of scholars based at universities across the globe including Europe, North America, Ocean, and MENA.
We feel that this panel will not only be of great interest to a variety of scholars attending APSA but also will help develop new research agendas in the study of technologies, media and mass-protest.

Sub Unit

• Division 44: Democracy and Autocracy

Individual Presentations

• Measuring the Ideology of Crowds: A Validation Test using Twitter Data - Christopher Barrie; Arun Frey, University of Oxford

• Bots for Autocrats: How Government-Sponsored Bots Fight Opposition in Russia - Joshua A. Tucker, New York University; Denis Stukal, University of Sydney; Sergey Sanovich, Princeton University; Richard Bonneau, NYU

• Lone Wolves: Determinants of Alone Participation in Protests - Olga Onuch, University of Manchester; Felipe G. Santos, University of Manchester

Chair

• Irina Soboleva Duke Kunshan University

Discussants

• Megan MacDuffee Metzger Stanford University

• Katerina Tertytchnaya University College London