No abstract

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.

Analyses of selection bias in the coverage of protest events in Minsk, Belarus between 1990 and 1995 are presented. The rapid changes characterizing Minsk during its transition from Communism made it an ideal location for investigating the stability of the patterns of selection bias. Police records of 817 protest events were used to create a protest event dataset, and Minsk's four daily newspapers were read for the entire period in order to establish estimates of event coverage. Results show that large events, events with strong sponsors and, in two of the four newspapers, events accompanied by arrests are each more likely to receive coverage. These effects remain stable through phases of the transition for the combined coverage in any of the papers. The selection factors of event size and event sponsorship also display stability across media source, although the impact of arrests is not always consequential.

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.

The Men’s Rights movements have grown extensively in the last four decades. Social media platforms, especially online communities, have been instrumental in the rise of the movement. Despite this, few studies have directly examined how the Men’s Rights movement frames its grievance in online spaces or analyzed community reactions to user-contributed content. To fill these gaps, we analyze 70,580 posts contributed to /r/MensRights, a large community of Men’s Rights activists on Reddit, using a combination of topic models and negative binomial regression. Our results indicate that users active on /r/MensRights have developed a core set of grievances. Due to the mechanics of Reddit, where users can upvote posts to increase their visibility, contributed content that is consistent with community norms is prominently featured. Online spaces such as /r/MensRights provide an optimal combination of self-reinforcing community norms and anonymity, providing social movements with powerful tools to expand their reach, recruit new members, and expand its political power. We argue that these dynamics apply more generally to social movement mobilization that occurs online.