The Structure of Protest Cycles: Inspiration and Bridging in South Korea’s Democracy Movement

Abstract

Although the concept of protest cycles has received much attention in the collective action literature, its empirical operationalization remains relatively crude compared to the rich theoretical discussion. Reimagining social movements as populations of interlinked protests, we demonstrate the advantages of analyzing protest event networks with a novel dataset related to South Korea’s democracy movement. In our conceptualization, protest events play the role of network nodes and links were identified based on protesters citing prior events as sources of inspiration for mobilizing. Appropriating strategies for network analysis, we assess the types of events that were more likely to be cited as sources of inspiration and bridge otherwise disconnected events. Our analysis shows that protests that raised systemic versus local issues and events that were repressed by the state were more likely to occupy central positions in the democracy movement. By identifying the characteristics of events that contribute to movement inspiration and bridging, our novel approach to analyzing protest events sheds new light on dominant themes in social movement research.

Does Non-violent Repression Have Stronger Dampening Effects than State Violence? Insight from an Emotion-Based Model of Non-violent Dissent

“…Our model moreover integrates the finding (Dornschneider 2021a) that the behaviour of others is the main source of emotions (Finding 3). This finding is consistent with social contagion and threshold theories of protest (see above) and new conceptualizations of protest cycles (Chang and Lee 2021), according to which non-violent dissent spreads based on the protest behaviour of others. While contagion models emphasize the negative role of fear (Kuran 1991; Noelle-Neumann 1974), which prevents people from joining unless a large number of protesters are on the street, the aforementioned new research emphasizes the role of positive emotions.…”

Life satisfaction and the conventionality of political participation: The moderation effect of post-materialist value orientation

“…One possible interpretation is that if participating in more unconventional political action implies more or less a violation of a societal norm, a participant’s subjective evaluation of his or her well-being is a critical motive for crossing the psychological and societal boundary of participation. These results call for further analysis to clarify the hypothetical mechanism of movement diffusion in other societal contexts (Chang and Lee, 2021).…”

Constructing Relational and Verifiable Protest Event Data: Four Challenges and Some Solutions*

“…Campaigns are often parts of episodes of contention, sequences of action and reaction by both or all "sides" of an issue (Franzosi 1999;Kriesi, Hutter and Bojar 2019;McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001). Protesters may explicitly link their protest to prior protests as part of a campaign or to evoke a politics of memory (Chang and Lee 2021). The claims-making tradition examines the interactions between the claims by different actors as they play out in news sources (Giugni et al 2005;Koopmans and Olzak 2004;Koopmans and Statham 1999a;Koopmans and Statham 1999b;Statham and Geddes 2006).…”