Patrick Rafail

Describing and Accounting for the Trends in US Protest Policing, 1960−1995

Numerous scholars have observed a decline in more coercive police tactics used to control demonstrations since the 1960s in North America and Western Europe. Such claims, however, are largely based on rather unsystematic observation, and almost no research directly examines the evolution of protest policing during this entire period. To address this gap, the authors use semiparametric logistic regression to examine reported police presence, the use of arrests, and the use of force at 15,965 US protests occurring between 1960 and 1995. The results confirm that while there has been an absolute decline in more repressive policing behavior, the transitional process was not a monotonic, linear process. The authors also investigate the different evolutionary patterns of each type of protest policing. The authors further demonstrate that African American initiated events, government targets, social movement organization presence, protest forms, the use of force, and arrests have variable impacts on police responses over time.

Using ZIP code business patterns data to measure alcohol outlet density

Some states maintain high-quality alcohol outlet databases but quality varies by state, making comprehensive comparative analysis across US communities difficult. This study assesses the adequacy of using ZIP Code Business Patterns (ZIP-BP) data on establishments as estimates of the number of alcohol outlets by ZIP code. Specifically we compare ZIP-BP alcohol outlet counts with high-quality data from state and local records surrounding 44 college campus communities across 10 states plus the District of Columbia. Results show that a composite measure is strongly correlated (R=0.89) with counts of alcohol outlets generated from official state records. Analyses based on Generalized Estimation Equation models show that community and contextual factors have little impact on the concordance between the two data sources. There are also minimal inter-state differences in the level of agreement. To validate the use of a convenient secondary data set (ZIP-BP) it is important to have a high correlation with the more complex, high quality and more costly data product (i.e., datasets based on the acquisition and geocoding of state and local records) and then to clearly demonstrate that the discrepancy between the two to be unrelated to relevant explanatory variables. Thus our overall findings support the adequacy of using a conveniently available data set (ZIP-BP data) to estimate alcohol outlet densities in ZIP code areas in future research.

Family Size, Cognitive Outcomes, and Familial Interaction in Stable, Two-Parent Families: United States, 1997–2002

Measures of children’s time use, particularly with parents and siblings, are used to evaluate three hypotheses in relation to the vocabulary and mathematical skills development: (1) the resource dilution hypothesis, which argues that parental and household resources are diluted in larger families; (2) the confluence hypothesis, which suggests that the intellectual milieu of families is lowered with additional children; and (3) the admixture (“no effect”) hypothesis, which suggests that the negative relationship between family size and achievement is an artifact of cross-sectional research resulting from unobserved heterogeneity. Each hypothesis is tested using within-child estimates of change in cognitive scores over time with the addition of new children to families.

Protests on the Front Page Media Salience, Institutional Dynamics, and Coverage of Collective Action in the New York Times, 1960-1995

Past research has illuminated consistent patterns in the type of protests that receive media attention. Still, we know relatively little about the differential prominence editors assign to events deemed worthy of coverage. We argue that while media routines shape whether events are covered, mass media organizations, social institutions, and systemic changes are important factors in determinations of prominence. To examine patterns of prominence, this study analyzes the factors influencing page placement patterns of protests covered in the New York Times, 1960-1995. We find that (1) protests are less likely to appear prominently over time, but this effect is conditioned by the paper’s editorial and publishing regime; (2) regime effects were especially consequential for civil rights and peace protests; (3) effects of event size and violence weakened over time; and (4) events embedded within larger cycles of protest coverage during less constricted news cycles were more likely to be featured prominently.

Nonprobability Sampling and Twitter

Twitter data are widely used in the social sciences. The Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) allows researchers to build large databases of user activity efficiently. Despite the potential of Twitter as a data source, less attention has been paid to issues of sampling, and in particular, the implications of different sampling strategies on overall data quality. This research proposes a set of conceptual distinctions between four types of populations that emerge when analyzing Twitter data and suggests sampling strategies that facilitate more comprehensive data collection from the Twitter API. Using three applications drawn from large databases of Twitter activity, this research also compares the results from the proposed sampling strategies, which provide defensible representations of the population of activity, to those collected with more frequently used hashtag samples. The results suggest that hashtag samples misrepresent important aspects of Twitter activity and may lead researchers to erroneous conclusions.

Policy spillover and the policing of protest in New York City, 1960–2006

Scholars have suggested that the policing of protest have become more permissive in Western democracies since the 1960s. While widely accepted, studies affirming a softening of police conduct have focused on national trends despite awareness that police tactics have unevenly diffused across the USA. This study examines the temporal trends in protest policing in New York City to evaluate how and why the dominant strategies of protest control have changed over time. Drawing on the widespread privatisation of public space in New York during the 1980s coupled with the adoption of Broken Windows crime control strategies, I develop an alternative explanation of the temporal dynamics of protest policing that is based on policy spillover, or the unintentional spillover effects that policy decisions unrelated to protest policing may nonetheless have on police conduct. Using a sample of 6147 protest events occurring in New York between 1960 and 2006, I confirm that the prevalence of arrests and other forms of police force have increased over time even though illegal or other contentious tactics have declined. The results additionally do not suggest that there is a direct relationship between crime rates and either arrests or the use of force. In regards to protest policing, the political construction and control of crime and disorder are more important than the absolute amount of crime, which is consistent with the proposed policy spillover explanation.

Empowered Participation or Political Manipulation?: State, Civil Society and Social Funds in Egypt and Bolivia

As structural adjustment policies and market reformations have become widely adopted throughout the global south, emancipatory political institutions, and particularly social funds, have become hallmark programs promoted by the World Bank. Initially conceived of as temporary solutions to the social problems brought about by rapid economic restructuring, social funds became durable institutions in many developing countries. Designed to be autonomous from the governmental bureaucracies, at least in principle, such institutions have been regarded as relatively successful programs. In Empowered Participation or Political Manipulation?, Rabab El-Mahdi analyzes major social funds in Bolivia and Egypt. She is concerned with evaluating the degree to which the funds achieve their stated goal: the creation of meaningful, community-centric participation in development and the political process through the provision of a social safety net, micro-loans, and other programs intended to nourish civil society. Informed by interviews with key actors in the state, the social fund bureaucracy, and the World Bank, coupled with extensive fieldwork, El-Mahdi convincingly demonstrates that in both states, the social funds were ultimately weak vehicles for development, largely replicating dysfunctional patterns of corporatism and favoritism found in the state bureaucracy. El-Mahdi begins by outlining her conceptualization of civil society, which is rooted in Gramscian theory, in Chapter Two. She develops three interrelated spheres (the state, the economy, and civil society), which allow for a richer analysis of how, for example, the state may use economic policies to coopt or otherwise transform civil society. Using the goals of social funds as a barometer of their success, she focuses on three core indicators: (1) participation, or who participates in the decision-making process of the social funds and how participation operates, (2) whether the social funds are accountable to the communities where the programs take place, as well as to governments, organizations, and donors participating in funds, and (3) the embeddedness of social fund programs in their local community, and particularly how the flows of information between specific sites of the fund and its central office allow for meaningful participation by beneficiaries or community members. A detailed accounting of the historical evolution of civil society in Egypt and Bolivia is provided in Chapter Three, where El-Mahdi deftly traces the different regimes, economic policies, and other factors shaping the development of civil society and its relationship to the state. This sets the context for a more thorough investigation into social funds for each case. Chapter Four examines Egypt’s Social Fund for Development (SFD), which was initially introduced in 1991 and became a permanent and autonomously funded institution by 1999. Here, she finds that, despite being an institution autonomous from the state, the SFD quickly became co-opted by the Egyptian government bureaucracy, which limited political dissent, and oriented it toward satisfying donors rather than recipient communities. Chapter Five turns to Bolivia’s Emergency Social Fund, which ultimately transformed into the Fondo de Inversion Productiva y Social (FPS) by 2000. While the implementation of the FPS had a limited improvement in local participation, unlike the SFD in Egypt, El-Mahdi argues that the allocation of funding was clientelistic, similar to the state bureaucracy. A concluding chapter is devoted to discussing the prospects for emancipatory political institutions generally, where El-Mahdi outlines how the difficulties in disentangling semiautonomous institutions from state bureaucracies limits the capacities of social funds and comparable programs to spur democracy, accountability, and development. Overall, El-Mahdi succeeds in pointing to the significant limitations of social funds as emancipatory programs that may have little net positive impacts for civil society and 682 Reviews

Protest in the city: Urban spatial restructuring and dissent in New York, 1960–2006:

Accessible space is a necessary component of urban protest. Little research, however, has examined the spatial evolution of protest activity over time. Much of the existing research emphasises the legal right to protest, however, less effort has been made to examine how micro-contexts may facilitate or impede dissent. This research focuses on how the built environment of cities can serve as either attractors or detractors of protest using a unique geocoded sample of 6217 protest events taking place in New York City between 1960 and 2006. I use a spatial count model to examine the relationship between the built environment and protest intensity. The results point to significant shifts in where protests have occurred over time. Protests become increasingly spatially concentrated, with a disproportionate amount of activism taking place on or in close proximity to privately owned public spaces. Spaces in close proximity to powerful organisational or institutional targets also experience heightened protest activity. Overall, I show that the built environment, and the social relationships creating it, powerfully influence where dissent occurs. This is consistent with the advent of neoliberal policies directing urban spatial restructuring, which have brought about a process of structural funnelling for protest, ultimately making events more likely to occur in spaces that are hostile to mobilisation.

Making the Tea Party Republican: Media Bias and Framing in Newspapers and Cable News:

Research on the Tea Party emphasizes the role of Fox News in magnifying the movement’s early successes. Fox News is credited with legitimizing the Tea Party’s grievances, allowing the movement to make rapid inroads into the Republican Party. We argue that such depictions of the Tea Party’s relationship to the Republican Party are at least partially the product of an oversimplified media narrative emphasizing the seamless integration of the two. We analyze 201,678 media documents from blog posts from Tea Party organizations, Fox News, MSNBC, and 785 newspapers. Our results show marked differences between how the Tea Party frames itself compared with other media sources frame the movement. MSNBC and Fox News discuss the Tea Party strategically, respectively, treating the movement as representing the worst and best aspects of the Republican Party. This is in stark contrast to how the activists frame the movement as conservative, but not strictly Republican, and often in conflict with the goals of the Republican Party.

Permeable Participation: Civic Engagement and Protest Mobilization in 20 OECD Countries, 1981–2008:

Civic engagement and protest mobilization have generally been treated as distinct activities, with separate literatures examining each form of participation. This differentiation largely rests on the political nature of protest, which is treated as inconsistent with more apolitical civic engagement. We argue that the boundaries between protest participation and civic engagement became more permeable over time. We link this to consistency in the profiles of individuals who become engaged and the institutionalization of protest, which expanded the participatory base of protest to new groups. Using four waves of the European and World Values Survey, we analyze 78,524 individuals from 20 member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Results from a multilevel multinomial logistic regression analysis demonstrate that while there have been modest increases in protesting and civic engagement over time, individuals participating in both types of activities have experienced the most growth, consistent with our argument.