Historicizing Explanations of Social Movement Repression

• In Event: 463 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 21. The Effects of Policing and Authoritarianism on Social Movements

Abstract

Research attempting to predict repression of protest has tended to rely on pooled time series data, resulting in ahistorical explanations of protest policing despite significant shifts in protest policing in the last 50 years. This paper works to ground explanations of protest policing in history by performing moving logistic regressions on police presence and action at protests, using the same Dynamics of Collective Action dataset used by several previous studies to perform pooled analyses of predictors of repression. The results reveal many consistencies overtime, suggesting particularly robust relationships, but also uncover many variations and period-specific relationships that have been obscured by previous studies. In general, the results further strengthen previous findings that threat, rather than weakness, drives protest policing. However, the results also suggest that exactly what constitutes threat actually varies across time. Furthermore, the results suggest that threat may be an especially powerful explanation of protest policing during the “doldrums,” the periods between peaks in the protest cycle.

Authors

• Heidi Reynolds-Stenson, University of Arizona

• Jennifer Earl, University of Arizona