Theorizing Protest Actions as Communication and Coercion

• In Event: 20263 - Recent Advances in Social Movement Research

Abstract

Catalogs of protest events are fundamental for the study of social movements, from the labor movement in the nineteenth century to Black Lives Matter in the twenty-first. There is a large methodological literature on protest events: how to compile and analyze these data (e.g. Biggs 2018; Demarest and Langer 2022; Fisher et al. 2019; Oliver, Hanna, and Lim 2023). What is lacking is an equivalent theoretical literature on the conceptualization of protest. There are a few perfunctory definitions, most famously Tilly’s ‘contentious gathering’ (Tilly and Schweitzer 1977). More important in practice are definitions implicit in publicly available databases, like Dynamics of Collective Action in the United States, 1960–1995 (DCAUS). But different datasets employ different criteria for inclusion and exclusion. Lawsuits and press conferences make up a significant fraction of events in DCUAS, for example, but they are not included in other datasets. Definitions are relegated to appendices and codebooks and lack theoretical justification. If ‘protest’ is a meaningful category of social life and a suitable subject for sociological generalization, then it requires coherent definition.

This paper has three aims. The first is to survey the various definitions of protest in the literature, either explicitly conceptualized or implicit in datasets. The second is to elucidate the communicative function of protest using theories of speech acts (Searle 1976) and of costly signaling (Spence 1973). This will show, for example, that most protest actions have the illocutionary force of directives or of expressives. The third is to isolate the features of different protest actions based on their twin functions of communication and coercion. This will explain, for example, why it can be rational for protesters to choose more costly forms of actions. The paper concludes with implications for empirical research.

Author

• Michael Biggs, University of Oxford