Jennifer Earl

Tanks, tear gas, and taxes: Toward a theory of movement repression

Despite the importance of research on repression to the study of social movements; few researchers have focused on developing a refined and powerful conceptualization of repression. To address the difficulties such theoretical inattention produces, three key dimensions of repression are outlined and crossed to produce a repression typology. The merit of this typology for researchers is shown by using the typology to: (1) reorganize major research findings on repression; (2) diagnose theoretical and empirical oversights and missteps in the study of repression; and (3) develop new hypotheses about explanatory factors related to repression and relationships between different forms of repression. Such a typology represents an important step toward creating richer theoretical explanations of repression.

Protest under Fire? Explaining the Policing of Protest

Hypotheses about police presence and police action at social movement protest events in New York State between 1968 and 1973 are tested with the aim of understanding the broad mechanisms of social control used by authorities during this cycle of mass protest. Contrary to the popular perception of overzealous police repression of protest in this period, results show that police did not attend the majority of protest events. Tests of dominant explanations of police presence using logistic regression analysis indicate that the best predictor of police presence at a protest event was how threatening the event was-police attended larger protest events and those that used confrontational tactics. Tests (using multinomial logistic regression) of explanations of police action, given police presence at an event, indicate that extreme forms of police action were also triggered by threatening characteristics of events. Events in which subordinate groups and social movement organizations participated were also more likely to draw police action. Novel contributions include the comparison of dominant explanations of protest policing and methods that move beyond the tradition of examining repression through police presence or absence.

The new site of activism: on-line organizations, movement entrepreneurs, and the changing location of social movement decision making

Most research on social movements and the Internet has focused on pre-existing movements which have recently adopted on-line tactics. This body of research has applied classic social movement theories to such movements, focusing on the faster communication, broader reach, and the expanded mobilization capacity facilitated by the Internet for pre-existing movements. Using the on-line strategic voting movement during the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election as a case study, we argue that the application of prior theory often overlooks the ways in which movements that emerge and thrive on-line function differently from conventional movements. Specifically, we argue that movement entrepreneurs, instead of social movement organizations, were largely responsible for organizing the strategic voting movement. This more entrepreneurial movement infrastructure brought with it changes in decision making processes and concerns. Decision making became more discretionary, the importance of leadership declined, decisions about organizational form became less problematic, and ideological and Internet-related concerns informed decision making in lieu of organizational or more standard social movement concerns. However, we argue that e-movements, and the strategic voting movement in particular, are not so exotic that they constitute fundamentally new forms of action; instead, such movements are still usefully thought of as social movements.

Pursuing social change online : The use of four protest tactics on the internet

This article examines the distribution and architecture of web sites hosting or directly linking to opportunities to participate in four online activist tactics: online petitioning, boycotting, and e-mailing and letter-writing campaigns. Specifically, this article addresses five basic structural questions: (1) Are opportunities to engage in these tactics usually organized around social movement organizations and/or actors? (2) Do sites tend to host or link to these tactics? (3) On average, how tactically specialized or tactically diversified are sites? (4) How are these tactics distributed across different types of sites? and (5) How many implementations of each tactic were offered per web site? Contributions include a clearer understanding of online opportunities to participate in these four tactics and the introduction of an innovative, methodological technique that generates best approximations of reachable populations of online content, which can be randomly sampled when those populations are large.

This Protest Will Be Tweeted: Twitter and Protest Policing during the Pittsburgh G20

This article examines the use of Twitter at protests surrounding the G20 meetings held in Pittsburgh, PA in September 2009. Based on work on information communication technologies and protest, and on more recent work on Twitter usage at protests, we develop several hypotheses about the content of tweets during protests. Most significantly, we argue that Twitter is a widely available mobile social networking tool that can be used to reduce information asymmetries between protesters and police. Examining the content of 30,296 tweets over a nine-day period, we find that protesters frequently used Twitter to share information, including information about protest locations, as well as the location and actions of police, which is information that was formerly monopolized by the police. Twitter use may be creating a new dynamic in protester and police interaction toward information symmetries. We conclude by identifying implications for policing practices and for protesters.

Movement Societies and Digital Protest: Fan Activism and Other Nonpolitical Protest Online*

Sociologists of culture studying “fan activism” have noted an apparent increase in its volume, which they attribute to the growing use of the Internet to register fan claims. However, scholars have yet to measure the extent of contemporary fan activism, account for why fan discontent has been expressed through protest, or precisely specify the role of the Internet in this expansion. We argue that these questions can be addressed by drawing on a growing body of work by social movement scholars on “movement societies,” and more particularly on a nascent thread of this approach we develop that theorizes the appropriation of protest practices for causes outside the purview of traditional social movements. Theorizing that the Internet, as a new media, is positioned to accelerate the diffusion of protest practices, we develop and test hypotheses about the use of movement practices for fan activism and other nonpolitical claims online using data on claims made in quasi-random samples of online petitions, boycotts, and e-mailing or letter-writing campaigns. Results are supportive of our hypotheses, showing that diverse claims are being pursued online, including culturally-oriented and consumer-based claims that look very different from traditional social movement claims. Findings have implications for students of social movements, sociologists of culture, and Internet studies.

THE DYNAMICS OF PROTEST-RELATED DIFFUSION ON THE WEB

Drawing on several larger literatures on diffusion processes, including literatures on the diffusion of innovations, disease spread, and the diffusion of information, this paper examines the classes of diffusion processes that may be relevant to understanding online protest and social movements. The author also argues that one commonly studied type of online, protest-related diffusion process – the online diffusion of information – has only minor theoretical implications for social movement theory. Two other diffusion processes – the diffusion of online, protest-related innovations and the diffusion of protest in its many forms as a problem-solving heuristic to new populations – are likely to qualitatively alter other (non-diffusion) social movement processes, creating important second-order, theoretical effects from these types of diffusion.

Methods, movements, and outcomes

This paper surveys the movement outcomes literature and finds that the literature is unevenly developed. “Intra-movement” outcomes have received more attention than “extra-movement” outcomes, and within extra-movement outcomes political outcomes have been studied more often than cultural outcomes. I argue that the differential impact of two major methodological burdens explains these discrepancies in research productivity. Specifically, I examine the difficulties extra-movement outcome researchers face in (1) defining and operationalizing outcomes; and (2) in defending causal claims and non-spuriousness. Further, I analyze and critique current approaches in the literature to handling these two issues. Finally, I offer seven solutions to these problems, each of which is intended to ease the methodological burdens presently slowing the study of movement outcomes.

CONTROLLING PROTEST: NEW DIRECTIONS FOR RESEARCH ON THE SOCIAL CONTROL OF PROTEST

Work on repression within the social movements literature has largely focused on state-based and coercive repression, despite both the empirical importance of private and non-coercive forms of protest control and the theoretical leverage studying other forms of protest control could offer. This paper argues that scholars should shift from studying repression, which as a terminology carries connotations about state-based and coercive action, and instead focus on the “social control of protest.” The paper then manufactures a literature on private forms of protest control, culling existing work from disparate fields and literatures. These works are organized using a previously published typology of repressive forms that covers such diverse actions as vigilantism and countermovement violence. This organization reveals that empirical research has been done on private protest control even if it has not been named as such or been connected to a coherent body of scholarship on the subject. The paper then examines possible directions for future research that could facilitate the growth of scholarship on private protest control.

Leading Tasks in a Leaderless Movement: The Case of Strategic Voting

Leadership has proven a difficult concept to define, with the proliferation of definitions of leadership being more notable than any individual definition. This article takes a different approach to understanding leadership dynamics by identifying and studying “leading tasks.” Specifically, tasks associated with leadership in existing research are enumerated. Using data on two “strategic voting” mobilizations in 2000 and 2004, the empirical salience of various leading tasks to key organizers is traced and explained. The data suggest that although leadership was not evident in strategic voting, organizers did identify, prioritize, and take action on specific leading tasks.