No abstract

Whether in contemporary protests or in key movements in United States history, protesters must often contend with police and sometimes also with counterprotesters. Clashes with counterprotesters are often tense, ripe with the possibility of violence, and increase the chance of a police response. Although there is research on countermovements, there is little on counterprotesting. We conduct a systematic, cross-movement analysis to forward a strategic threatbased explanation of counterprotesting. We examine the frequency of counterdemonstration, the relative merits of threat versus weakness explanations of counterdemonstrator mobilization, and the relationship between counterdemonstrating and protest policing. We find that counterprotesting is relatively uncommon, is more common at conservative protests, and is explained by the threat posed by, and strength of, the initial movement. Furthermore, policing and counterdemonstrating appear positively and reciprocally related: we find that recent police repression increases counterdemonstration, and existing research shows that counterdemonstrators, in turn, increase police response.

While social network analysis (SNA) has traditionally been used to study actor networks, it can also reveal "meaning structures" (Mohr 1998), the relationships connecting cultural elements such as ideas and practices. We argue that the repertoire of contention represents a meaning structure, analyzable using SNA of tactical co-deployments at protests. We use data from over 7,000 protest events in New York State from 1960 to 1995. Our analyses suggest that co-deployed tactics are not chosen independently or combined randomly but rather cluster into sets with distinct roles. These roles reveal cultural affinities among the tactics and are largely stable over time, although some variation related to the protest cycle and tactical form can be detected. We also examine the position of a specific theoretical category of tactics, radical tactics, within the larger tactical repertoire.

We examine how social media may facilitate protest mobilization in response to violent state repression. Prior research demonstrates that violent repression can either decrease protest participation through raising the costs of participation, or can generate outrage, resulting in “backfire” and an increase in mobilization. Many recent mass mobilizations have garnered attention from scholars and journalists alike due to the instances of repression backfiring as well as the widespread use of social media in these protest movements. We examine why these two trends may be related using logistic regression analysis on data on participants in the Gezi Park Protests in summer 2013. Controlling for confounding factors, we find a statistically significant relationship between being recruited to participate in the protests through social media and joining the mass mobilization as a reaction to police repression. We argue that in the case of Gezi Park, communication through social media was a key factor in facilitating social movement mobilization in response to repression.

Objective Previous studies on the relationship between interpersonal trust and social movement participation have largely focused on the simple link, without attention to the interaction between trust and aspects of the political context. This study investigates this contingent effect of two types of interpersonal trust (ingroup and outgroup trust) on social movement participation. Method The data are drawn from the World Values Survey 6th wave and country‐level Macro Indices from 41 countries. We use multilevel modeling (random coefficient model) to test the contingent effect of trust. Results The results reveal a positive association between outgroup trust and protest participation, moderated by both functioning institutions and state repression. Meanwhile, ingroup trust is not significantly associated with protest participation. Conclusion This contingent theory of trust could reconcile previous inconsistent empirical findings and explain why trust may have an insignificant or weaker effect on social movement participation in some contexts.