Measuring and analyzing protest potential from a survey data recycling framework

Publication type

Journal Article

Author

Publication date

April 15, 2022

Summary:

As active involvement in protest has been legitimized as an acceptable form of political activity, citizens’ protest potential has become an important measure to understand contemporary democratic politics. However, the arbitrary use of a forced-choice question, which prevents those who have previously participated in protests from expressing willingness to engage in future protest, and the limited coverage of international surveys across countries and years have impeded comparative research on protest potential. This research develops a new systematic weighting method for the measurement of protest potential for comparative research. Using the 1996 International Social Survey Program survey, which asks two separate questions about “have done” and “would do” demonstrations, I create a weighting scale for the forced-choice question by estimating the predicted probabilities of protest potential for those who have already participated in demonstrations. Capitalizing on the survey data recycling framework, this study also controls for harmonization procedures and the quality of surveys, thereby expanding the cross-national and temporal coverage beyond the affluent Western democracies. The results show that this weighting scale provides a valid measure of protest potential, and the survey data recycling framework improves comparability between surveys.

Published in

American Behavioral Scientist

Volume and page numbers

Volume: 66 , p.434 -458

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642211021626

ISSN

27642

Subjects

Notes

Open Access

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).


Related Publications

#547048

News

Latest findings, new research

Publications search

Search all research by subject and author

Podcasts

Researchers discuss their findings and what they mean for society

Projects

Background and context, methods and data, aims and outputs

Events

Conferences, seminars and workshops

Survey methodology

Specialist research, practice and study

Taking the long view

ISER's annual report

Themes

Key research themes and areas of interest