The empirical analysis of protest events and other expressions of social conflict is one of the core tasks of the discipline of comparative sociology. The numerous international data sets and empirical country comparisons that rely exclusively on reporting in English-language newspapers such as The New York Times in surveying protest events nevertheless suffer from considerable distortions. Using the example of some 1800 protest events in Argentina, Mexico and Paraguay in the year 2006, the present study shows that there are remarkable differences between national and international (English-language) newspapers when it comes to frequency of reporting. On the one hand, a mere 5.3 percent of all protest events that are reported nationally also attract the attention of the international press. On the other hand, the percentage of international reporting depends considerably and to a statistically significant extent on the country in which the protest takes place. Besides, these country differences persist when additional protest characteristics (e.g. the number of participants, the participation of renowned personalities and the escalation of the protest into rioting) are controlled by means of multivariate logistic regressions. The measurement error that results when surveying protest events on the strength of coverage in the English-language international press is therefore not constant across countries. The frequently used data sets like the World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators or the Cross-National Time Series Data Archive launched by Arthur Banks are thus proving to be highly questionable sources for international comparisons in protest and conflict research.
AAM Bibliography Postprint versionLanguage policy in German-speaking Swiss kindergartens recently has been subject to change. While dialect traditionally was spoken to kindergartners, the use of High German has been established to promote the integration of migrant children and equality of opportunity. In this contribution, we look at how kindergarten teachers translate the new diglossic language policy into language practices. Drawing on data from an ongoing ethnographic study, we examine four logics of language use concerning when to speak dialect or High German. As teachers' use of language differs not only according to situations and pedagogical sequences but also due to children's social and migrant backgrounds, we askdrawing on the theoretical concept of (un-)doing difference -how different linguistic addressing reflects (and affects) children's positions in the social order.
The number of conceptually bilingual daycare centers has been steadily increasing in Switzerland, a traditionally multilingual country. Yet, the focus on the languages introduced in these institutions has largely remained on one national languageand English. We look at how English andin our case -German are employed in daycare centers and how their prioritization leads to a reproduction and legitimization of language hierarchies. Drawing on the theoretical perspectives of translanguaging, code-switching, and language hierarchies as well as data from an ethnographic study in three daycare centers, we investigate how teachers and children employ different languages in the light of restrictions imposed by the daycare centers' language policy. Although these are implemented differently in each institution, the overall commonality is the juxtaposition of the prestigious and official languages used, German and English, and the virtual exclusion of children's heritage languages.
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