Understanding Repression in the Occupy Movement

• In Event: 463 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 23. The Occupy Movement

Abstract

Past research on social movement repression has paid attention to the role of political elites, media, police and other potential opponents, and the level of threat posed by the movement in explaining the presence of various forms of social control. This paper attempts to further our understanding of how the behavior and characteristics of local elites affects repression, by looking at one of the most recent cases of widespread movement repression- the Occupy Movement in the US. I focus on variation in repression across a representative sample of 74 US cities in November 2011, a month during which the police evicted a large part of the movement's encampments. Using survey data drawn from activists, newspaper records and data published by activists, I account for the overall numbers of arrests of Occupy activists in November in each city, and the intensity of repression. I estimate zero-inflated negative binomial regression models, with movement size specified as the exposure to analyze differences in arrests between cities and multinomial regression models to analyze differences in repression intensity. My results show that movement size plays a role in repression, however while overall size is positively correlated to repression, size relative to population is negatively correlated. Police characteristics are important in shaping repression, specifically history of police brutality, relative proportion of city budget spent on police and proportion of blacks in the police force. Lastly, media coverage affects repression, especially humanization of movement participants and both criticism and praise of movement objectives.

Author

• Eric Turner, University of New Mexico