MEASURING PROTEST FOR COMPARISONS: MULTIDIMENSIONAL SCALING OF ACTION, MESSAGE, AND COMMUNITY*
We introduce a fine-grained method of categorizing protests by their strategies and tactics that places protests in a multidimensional space based on motivations—direct change towards a policy or goal; changing public discourse narratives; and building movement identities or communities. This technique recognizes that multiple motivations may exist and allows protests to be compared based on where they are in multiple dimensions. To test our method and the theoretical dimensions we hypothesize, we surveyed protesters at the 2016 Republican and Democratic National Conventions. Using questions about participant goals and targets, and confirmatory factor analysis, we corroborate the existence of three dimensions. We show these dimensions provide real information about the differences between protests outside the two conventions. We conclude by discussing how our multidimensional measure can be extended to other events, social movement organizations, or whole movements to facilitate comparisons of events, organizations, or movements across time and space.
Contributor Notes
* The authors thank Penn State’s social movement reading group, David Karol, Michael Heaney, Kristin Goss, Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz, and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their comments on the project or paper. We also thank John McCarthy, Dan Gillion, Sarah Liu, Patricia Posey, Karen Beckwith, and the eighteen Penn State and University of Pennsylvania undergraduates who worked to make the survey possible. Funding for this protest survey and for a conference to develop the survey instrument was provided by Penn State’s College of Liberal Arts, the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, and the University of Pennsylvania. Finally, we thank Mackenzie Cornell for compiling the list of organizations used in table 2.
† Kevin Reuning is Assistant Professor at Miami University of Ohio. Email: reunink@miamioh.edu. Lee Ann Banaszak is Professor in Political Science at The Pennsylvania State University.