Jennifer Earl
Biographic Data
| ID | 245340 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jennifer Earl |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jennifer |
| FAMILY NAME | Earl |
| SIGNATURE | EARL J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Arizona |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0904-1605 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1479 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Mobilization Forum on “Video Protest Event Analysis
Principals’ Responses to Student Gun Violence Protests: Deter, Manage, or Educate for Democracy
Context: School-based student protests have received little scholarly attention, yet they have the potential to impact the school community, students’ civic development, and larger social movements. Principals are key actors in responding to school-based student protests. As school leaders, principals’ actions affect the outcome of student protests and shape many students’ first experiences as activists. Purpose: This study examines U.S. public h…
The digital repression of social movements, protest, and activism: A synthetic review
Repression research examines the causes and consequences of actions or policies that are meant to, or actually do, raise the costs of activism, protest, and/or social movement activity. The rise of digital and social media has brought substantial increases in attention to the repression of digital activists and movements and/or to the use of digital tools in repression, which is spread across many disciplines and areas of study. We organize and r…
Layers of Political Repression: Integrating Research on Social Movement Repression
Social movements are critical sources of change in both democratic and undemocratic contexts, leading authorities and others to attempt to prevent, constrain, or otherwise control them. In this review, we argue that research relevant to a comprehensive understanding of social movement repression is scattered across disciplines, including sociology, political science, law and society, and area studies, with each discipline focusing on different as…
The Puzzle of Protest Policing Over Time: Historicizing Repression Research Using Temporal Moving Regressions
Research attempting to predict repression, including the policing of protest, has tended to rely on pooled time series data, which statistically produces coefficients that estimate the average relationship between each variable and the outcome across the entire pooled time period. When relationships are very stable, this statistical assumption, referred to as temporal homogeneity, is unproblematic. But, when enforced without testing, it threatens…
Softer Policing or the Institutionalization of Protest? Decomposing Changes in Observed Protest Policing over Time
Protest policing is central to research on social movement repression and of great practical importance. Here, we examine competing explanations for observed changes in the likelihood that police will attend any given protest event and make arrests, use violence, or both in New York State from 1960 to 1995. While many researchers point to changes within law enforcement as the primary cause for “softer policing” over this period, we show, using a …
Spillover as Movement Agenda Setting: Using Computational and Network Techniques for Improved Rare Event Identification
The increasing availability of data, along with sophisticated computational methods for analyzing them, presents researchers with new opportunities and challenges. In this article, we address both by describing computational and network methods that can be used to identify cases of rare phenomena. We evaluate each method’s relative utility in the identification of a specific rare phenomenon of interest to social movement researchers: the spillove…
One Size Doesn't Fit All: Connecting Views of Activism With Youth Activist Identification
Identity is crucial to social movement participation. Existing research examines why active people “avoid” activist identities but has less to say about how active people adopt such identities as if they automatically follow participation. We draw on interviews with high school and college students from a midsize southwestern city to examine how young people make sense of what it means to be an activist, who identifies as such, and why youth are …
Symposium on political communication and social movements: Audience, persuasion, and influence
This article argues that an important contribution that political communication can offer social movement studies is a more variegated understanding of social movement audiences and their role in social movement strategy and processes. Specifically, the article introduces a coarse typology of social movement audiences and discusses the importance of understanding differences in the goals of these audiences and what kinds of influence, from messag…
Barrier or Booster? Digital Media, Social Networks, and Youth Micromobilization
Research on young people's protest participation has focused on how the family, peers, and institutions support activism and micromobilization. But digital and social media usage has arguably altered how we interact and how individuals participate in politics and activism, especially among youth. This sets up an important question: Do the institutional supports (e.g., schools) and network ties (e.g., friends and family) that have historically dri…
Clashes of Conscience: Explaining Counterdemonstration at Protests
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 strat…
Contentious Politics in the Trump Era
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Organizing the Next Generation: Youth Engagement with Activism Inside and Outside of Organizations
Social movement scholars have long considered organizations (social movement organizations [SMOs]) vital to the success of a movement. SMOs organize events, mobilize participants, and recruit new activists into the movement. In the case of youth activism, SMOs can also play a vital role in the political socialization of youth. However, a substantial line of research finds that most SMOs do a poor job of encouraging and facilitating youth engageme…
Youth, activism, and social movements
There has been considerable debate over the extent and role of young people's political participation. Whether considering popular hand‐wringing over concerns about declines in young people's institutional political participation or dismissals of young people's use of online activism, many frame youth engagement through a “youth deficit” model that assumes that adults need to politically socialize young people. However, others argue that young pe…
Routing Around Organizations: Self-Directed Political Consumption
Recent research on activism in the context of digital media has argued that organizing can happen outside of organizations and even without SMOs. This work has been focused primarily on the “supply side” of participation. In this article, we expand this line of work by focusing on the “demand side.” We examine the distinction between self-directed and organizationally directed activism from the perspective of the individual, finding that shifts t…
The new information frontier: Toward a More Nuanced View of Social Movement Communication
The information environment that social movements face is increasingly complex, making traditional assumptions about media, messaging, and communication used in social movement studies less relevant. Building on work begun within the study of digital protest, we argue that a greater integration of political communication research within social movement studies could offer substantial research contributions. We illustrate this claim by discussing …
Online protest participation and the digital divide: Modeling the effect of the digital divide on online petition-signing
Scholars have long been concerned about the effect that digital inequalities might have on marginalized populations. Concern for the “digital divide” extends to social movement scholars, who worry that the digital divide will lead to social movements privileging the concerns of the middle class over those of disadvantaged groups. We argue for a novel way of testing for such effects—the use of a Heckman regression model to model participation in o…
The Consequences of Social Movements
Social movements have attracted much attention in recent years, both from scholars and among the wider public. This book examines the consequences of social movements, covering such issues as the impact of social movements on the life course of participants and the population in general, on political elites and markets, and on political parties and processes of social movement institutionalization. The volume makes a significant contribution to r…
Citasa: Intellectual past and future
This article reviews the history of the Communication and Information Technologies section of the American Sociological Association (CITASA), and discusses its current research emphases and future trajectory. Critically, the article argues that CITASA has become the preeminent point of reconnection between sociology and communication, allowing cross-pollination of ideas in the study of digital media, and increasingly in the study of media more br…
Social Movements, Repression of
The repression of social movements refers to attempts by groups, individuals, or state actors (e.g., militaries, national police, and local police) to increase the costs associated with social movement participation or otherwise limit social movement activity. Commonly studied forms of repression include police action at public protest events, military suppression of protest events, arrests and/or imprisonment of activists, covert infiltration of…
The Future of Social Movement Organizations: The Waning Dominance of SMOs Online
This article examines the role of social movement organizations (SMOs) in Internet activism. While SMOs may still play a vital role in offline protest that is facilitated online, I argue that SMOs do not necessarily offer strong returns on investment for forms of protest in which participation occurs online or in which entire movements are organized online. Specifically, I argue that several critical functions for SMOs in offline social movements…
Hitting middle age never felt so good: Introduction to the American Sociological Association Communication and Information Technologies section 2013 special issue
Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring
The role of digital media in the Arab Spring is one of the most hotly contested subjects in the study of contemporary social movements and revolutions. On the one hand, journalists and onlookers eagerly cast these conflicts as sudden shifts that represent Twitter or Facebook revolutions. On the other hand, many Western activists and social movement scholars bridle at a starring role for digital media, leading to strident denials. Philip N. Howard…
Culturally Constrained Contention: Mapping the Meaning Structure of the Repertoire of Contention
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 sug…
Digital Media and Political Engagement Worldwide: A Comparative Study
The Use of Newspaper Data in the Study of Collective Action
Studying collective action with newspaper accounts of protest events, rare only 20 years ago, has become commonplace in the past decade. A critical literature has accompanied the growth of protest event analysis. The literature has focused on selection bias-particularly which subset of events are covered-and description bias-notably, the veracity of the coverage. The 'hard news' of the event, if it is reported, tends to be relatively accurate. Ho…
Protest under Fire? Explaining the Policing of Protest
Hypotheses about police presence and police action at social movement protest events in New York State between 1968 and 1973 are tested with the aim of understanding the broad mechanisms of social control used by authorities during this cycle of mass protest. Contrary to the popular perception of overzealous police repression of protest in this period, results show that police did not attend the majority of protest events. Tests of dominant expla…
Political Repression: Iron Fists, Velvet Gloves, and Diffuse Control
This article reviews research on political repression by social movement scholars. Four topics are discussed: (a) debates over the conceptualization of repression, the breadth of the concept, whether distinctions within the concept are productive and/or forms of repression are directly comparable, and the relationship between repression and political opportunities; (b) recent research on different types of repression, particularly protest policin…
Tanks, Tear Gas, and Taxes: Toward a Theory of Movement Repression
Despite the importance of research on repression to the study of social movements; few researchers have focused on developing a refined and powerful conceptualization of repression. To address the difficulties such theoretical inattention produces, three key dimensions of repression are outlined and crossed to produce a repression typology. The merit of this typology for researchers is shown by using the typology to: (1) reorganize major research…
Seeing Blue: A Police-Centered Explanation of Protest Policing
Existing explanations of repression and the policing of protest focus on the interests of political elites, with research indicating that a chief predictor of state repression is the level of threat protesters pose to elite interests. However, prior research has only paid sporadic attention to how the institutional and organizational characteristics of local law enforcement agencies shape the character of protest policing. This article addresses …
A Movement Society Evaluated: Collective Protest in The United States, 1960-1986
In an attempt to make sense of shifts in the social movement sector and its relationship to conventional politics over the past forty years, some have proposed that Western nations are increasingly becoming "movement societies." Accordingly, there are four key characteristics of the movement society: (1) over time expansion of protest; (2) over time diffusion of protest; (3) over time institutionalization of protest; and (4) over time institution…
Youth, activism, and social movements
There has been considerable debate over the extent and role of young people's political participation. Whether considering popular hand‐wringing over concerns about declines in young people's institutional political participation or dismissals of young people's use of online activism, many frame youth engagement through a “youth deficit” model that assumes that adults need to politically socialize young people. However, others argue that young pe…
Changing the World One Webpage at a Time: Conceptualizing and Explaining Internet Activism
Researchers studying Internet activism have disagreed over the extent to which Internet usage alters the processes driving collective action, and therefore also over the utility of existing social movement theory. We argue that some of this disagreement owes to scholars studying different kinds of Internet activism. Therefore, we introduce a typology of Internet activism, which shows that markedly different findings are associated with different …
Introduction: Repression and the Social Control of Protest
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jennifer Earl; Introduction: Repression and the Social Control of Protest. Mobilization: An International Quarterly 1 June 2006; 11 (2): 129–143. doi: https://doi.org/10.17813/maiq.11.2.b55gm84032815278 Download citation file: Ris (Zoter…
The Enactment of State-Level Hate Crime Law in the United States: Intrastate and Interstate Factors
Pursuing Social Change Online: The Use of Four Protest Tactics on the Internet
This article examines the distribution and architecture of web sites hosting or directly linking to opportunities to participate in four online activist tactics: online petitioning, boycotting, and e-mailing and letter-writing campaigns. Specifically, this article addresses five basic structural questions: (1) Are opportunities to engage in these tactics usually organized around social movement organizations and/or actors? (2) Do sites tend to ho…
Routing Around Organizations: Self-Directed Political Consumption
Recent research on activism in the context of digital media has argued that organizing can happen outside of organizations and even without SMOs. This work has been focused primarily on the “supply side” of participation. In this article, we expand this line of work by focusing on the “demand side.” We examine the distinction between self-directed and organizationally directed activism from the perspective of the individual, finding that shifts t…
Clashes of Conscience: Explaining Counterdemonstration at Protests
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 strat…
Movement Societies and Digital Protest: Fan Activism and Other Nonpolitical Protest Online
Sociologists of culture studying 'fan activism' have noted an apparent increase in its volume, which they attribute to the growing use of the Internet to register fan claims. However, scholars have yet to measure the extent of contemporary fan activism, account for why fan discontent has been expressed through protest, or precisely specify the role of the Internet in this expansion. We argue that these questions can be addressed by drawing on a g…
The Future of Social Movement Organizations: The Waning Dominance of SMOs Online
This article examines the role of social movement organizations (SMOs) in Internet activism. While SMOs may still play a vital role in offline protest that is facilitated online, I argue that SMOs do not necessarily offer strong returns on investment for forms of protest in which participation occurs online or in which entire movements are organized online. Specifically, I argue that several critical functions for SMOs in offline social movements…
Culturally Constrained Contention: Mapping the Meaning Structure of the Repertoire of Contention
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 sug…
Online protest participation and the digital divide: Modeling the effect of the digital divide on online petition-signing
Scholars have long been concerned about the effect that digital inequalities might have on marginalized populations. Concern for the “digital divide” extends to social movement scholars, who worry that the digital divide will lead to social movements privileging the concerns of the middle class over those of disadvantaged groups. We argue for a novel way of testing for such effects—the use of a Heckman regression model to model participation in o…
Cease and Desist: Repression, Strategic Voting and the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election
Online political activism has rapidly increased over the past decade, forcing state authorities to adapt repressive strategies to handle this change. Few researchers, however, have explored hostile state reactions to unconventional online political activity and fewer still have tried to analyze the impacts of state repression on internet-based activism. In this article, we use data on strategic voting, which occurred during the 2000 U.S. presiden…
From Barricades to Firewalls? Strategic Voting and Social Movement Leadership in the Internet Age
Strategic voting, which was frequently described as 'Nader trading,' emerged during the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election as a way for voters to redefine their participation in the American electoral process. As a movement that emerged online, strategic voting not only presents potential political ramifications, but raises important issues for social movement scholars. In particular, movements that emerge online, which we refer to as 'e-movements,'…
Organizing the Next Generation: Youth Engagement with Activism Inside and Outside of Organizations
Social movement scholars have long considered organizations (social movement organizations [SMOs]) vital to the success of a movement. SMOs organize events, mobilize participants, and recruit new activists into the movement. In the case of youth activism, SMOs can also play a vital role in the political socialization of youth. However, a substantial line of research finds that most SMOs do a poor job of encouraging and facilitating youth engageme…
Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age
An investigation into how specific Web technologies can change the dynamics of organizing and participating in political and social protest. Much attention has been paid in recent years to the emergence of “Internet activism,” but scholars and pundits disagree about whether online political activity is different in kind from more traditional forms of activism. Does the global reach and blazing speed of the Internet affect the essential character …
Leading Tasks in a Leaderless Movement: The Case of Strategic Voting
Leadership has proven a difficult concept to define, with the proliferation of definitions of leadership being more notable than any individual definition. This article takes a different approach to understanding leadership dynamics by identifying and studying "leading tasks." Specifically, tasks associated with leadership in existing research are enumerated. Using data on two "strategic voting" mobilizations in 2000 and 2004, the empirical salie…
Layers of Political Repression: Integrating Research on Social Movement Repression
Social movements are critical sources of change in both democratic and undemocratic contexts, leading authorities and others to attempt to prevent, constrain, or otherwise control them. In this review, we argue that research relevant to a comprehensive understanding of social movement repression is scattered across disciplines, including sociology, political science, law and society, and area studies, with each discipline focusing on different as…
Barrier or Booster? Digital Media, Social Networks, and Youth Micromobilization
Research on young people's protest participation has focused on how the family, peers, and institutions support activism and micromobilization. But digital and social media usage has arguably altered how we interact and how individuals participate in politics and activism, especially among youth. This sets up an important question: Do the institutional supports (e.g., schools) and network ties (e.g., friends and family) that have historically dri…
The new information frontier: Toward a More Nuanced View of Social Movement Communication
The information environment that social movements face is increasingly complex, making traditional assumptions about media, messaging, and communication used in social movement studies less relevant. Building on work begun within the study of digital protest, we argue that a greater integration of political communication research within social movement studies could offer substantial research contributions. We illustrate this claim by discussing …
The differential protection of minority groups: The inclusion of sexual orientation, gender and disability in state hate crime laws, 1976–1995
The Enactment of State-Level Hate Crime Law in the United States: Intrastate and Interstate Factors
Gender and Social Movements
Chapter 1 1. The Social Movement as Gendered Terrain Chapter 2 2. Background and History: The Case Studies in Comparative Gender Perspective Chapter 3 3. Theorizing Gender in Social Movements Chapter 4 4. Getting Fired Up: Gendered Factors in Movement Mobilization Chapter 5 5. Social Resistance Strategies: The Myth of Gender Neutrality Chapter 6 6. Repercussions: Gendered Interests and Social Movement Outcomes Chapter 7 References Chapter 8 Appen…
Protest under Fire? Explaining the Policing of Protest
Hypotheses about police presence and police action at social movement protest events in New York State between 1968 and 1973 are tested with the aim of understanding the broad mechanisms of social control used by authorities during this cycle of mass protest. Contrary to the popular perception of overzealous police repression of protest in this period, results show that police did not attend the majority of protest events. Tests of dominant expla…
The Gay 90s: Models of Legal Decision-Making, Change and History1
Using legal rulings on gay marriages from two periods in the U.S., I analyze the ability of dominant approaches to legal decision-making to explain the rulings, their content, and changes from one period to the next. I show that no single dominant approach can address all three concerns. Instead, an approach that blends existing "attitudinal" and new institutionalist models within a structuration framework is developed and defended. In addition t…
Tanks, Tear Gas, and Taxes: Toward a Theory of Movement Repression
Despite the importance of research on repression to the study of social movements; few researchers have focused on developing a refined and powerful conceptualization of repression. To address the difficulties such theoretical inattention produces, three key dimensions of repression are outlined and crossed to produce a repression typology. The merit of this typology for researchers is shown by using the typology to: (1) reorganize major research…
Cease and Desist: Repression, Strategic Voting and the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election
Online political activism has rapidly increased over the past decade, forcing state authorities to adapt repressive strategies to handle this change. Few researchers, however, have explored hostile state reactions to unconventional online political activity and fewer still have tried to analyze the impacts of state repression on internet-based activism. In this article, we use data on strategic voting, which occurred during the 2000 U.S. presiden…
The Use of Newspaper Data in the Study of Collective Action
Studying collective action with newspaper accounts of protest events, rare only 20 years ago, has become commonplace in the past decade. A critical literature has accompanied the growth of protest event analysis. The literature has focused on selection bias-particularly which subset of events are covered-and description bias-notably, the veracity of the coverage. The 'hard news' of the event, if it is reported, tends to be relatively accurate. Ho…
From Barricades to Firewalls? Strategic Voting and Social Movement Leadership in the Internet Age
Strategic voting, which was frequently described as 'Nader trading,' emerged during the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election as a way for voters to redefine their participation in the American electoral process. As a movement that emerged online, strategic voting not only presents potential political ramifications, but raises important issues for social movement scholars. In particular, movements that emerge online, which we refer to as 'e-movements,'…
A Movement Society Evaluated: Collective Protest in The United States, 1960-1986
In an attempt to make sense of shifts in the social movement sector and its relationship to conventional politics over the past forty years, some have proposed that Western nations are increasingly becoming "movement societies." Accordingly, there are four key characteristics of the movement society: (1) over time expansion of protest; (2) over time diffusion of protest; (3) over time institutionalization of protest; and (4) over time institution…
Pursuing Social Change Online: The Use of Four Protest Tactics on the Internet
This article examines the distribution and architecture of web sites hosting or directly linking to opportunities to participate in four online activist tactics: online petitioning, boycotting, and e-mailing and letter-writing campaigns. Specifically, this article addresses five basic structural questions: (1) Are opportunities to engage in these tactics usually organized around social movement organizations and/or actors? (2) Do sites tend to ho…
Introduction: Repression and the Social Control of Protest
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jennifer Earl; Introduction: Repression and the Social Control of Protest. Mobilization: An International Quarterly 1 June 2006; 11 (2): 129–143. doi: https://doi.org/10.17813/maiq.11.2.b55gm84032815278 Download citation file: Ris (Zoter…
Seeing Blue: A Police-Centered Explanation of Protest Policing
Existing explanations of repression and the policing of protest focus on the interests of political elites, with research indicating that a chief predictor of state repression is the level of threat protesters pose to elite interests. However, prior research has only paid sporadic attention to how the institutional and organizational characteristics of local law enforcement agencies shape the character of protest policing. This article addresses …
Social Movements, Repression of
The repression of social movements refers to attempts by groups, individuals, or state actors (e.g., militaries, national police, and local police) to increase the costs associated with social movement participation or otherwise limit social movement activity. Commonly studied forms of repression include police action at public protest events, such as arrests and police violence, military suppression of protest events, “disappearances” of activis…
Leading Tasks in a Leaderless Movement: The Case of Strategic Voting
Leadership has proven a difficult concept to define, with the proliferation of definitions of leadership being more notable than any individual definition. This article takes a different approach to understanding leadership dynamics by identifying and studying "leading tasks." Specifically, tasks associated with leadership in existing research are enumerated. Using data on two "strategic voting" mobilizations in 2000 and 2004, the empirical salie…
The Targets of Online Protest: State and private targets of four online protest tactics
A major debate has erupted in recent work on social movements about the role of the state in protest, with some advocating alternative approaches to the study of social movements, such as a focus on institutional authorities. Using data on four types of online protest (petitions, boycotts, and letter-writing and email campaigns), acquired using an innovative new methodology that produces a generalizable sample of online protest actions, this pape…
The Process Is the Punishment: Thirty Years Later
This essay reviews the arguments and impacts of the classic work, The Process Is the Punishment by Malcolm Feeley, originally published in 1979 and republished with a new foreword and preface in 1992. This essay examines how the book has been used in sociolegal research since 1979 by empirically tracing its citation in published work. I also examine missed opportunities where The Process Is the Punishment could still expand its impact in the lite…
An Admirable Call to Improve, But Not Fundamentally Change, Our Collective Methodological Practices
Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth
The relationship of participation in online communities to civic and political engagement.Young people today have grown up living substantial portions of their lives online, seeking entertainment, social relationships, and a place to express themselves. It is clear that participation in online communities is important for many young people, but less clear how this translates into civic or political engagement. This volume examines the relationshi…
Information Access and Protest Policing Post-9/11: Studying the Policing of the 2004 Republican National Convention
The War on Terror, created by the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11, has brought about changes in domestic intelligence and protest policing that have proven hard to conclusively identify, track, and explain despite the importance of these changes to research on the repression of social movements. This paper argues that a second important trend has also been part of the War on Terror: increasing government secrecy regarding its protest cont…
Movement Societies and Digital Protest: Fan Activism and Other Nonpolitical Protest Online
Sociologists of culture studying 'fan activism' have noted an apparent increase in its volume, which they attribute to the growing use of the Internet to register fan claims. However, scholars have yet to measure the extent of contemporary fan activism, account for why fan discontent has been expressed through protest, or precisely specify the role of the Internet in this expansion. We argue that these questions can be addressed by drawing on a g…
The Dynamics of Protest-Related Diffusion on the Web
Drawing on several larger literatures on diffusion processes, including literatures on the diffusion of innovations, disease spread, and the diffusion of information, this paper examines the classes of diffusion processes that may be relevant to understanding online protest and social movements. The author also argues that one commonly studied type of online, protest-related diffusion process – the online diffusion of information – has only minor…
Changing the World One Webpage at a Time: Conceptualizing and Explaining Internet Activism
Researchers studying Internet activism have disagreed over the extent to which Internet usage alters the processes driving collective action, and therefore also over the utility of existing social movement theory. We argue that some of this disagreement owes to scholars studying different kinds of Internet activism. Therefore, we introduce a typology of Internet activism, which shows that markedly different findings are associated with different …
Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age
An investigation into how specific Web technologies can change the dynamics of organizing and participating in political and social protest. Much attention has been paid in recent years to the emergence of “Internet activism,” but scholars and pundits disagree about whether online political activity is different in kind from more traditional forms of activism. Does the global reach and blazing speed of the Internet affect the essential character …
Political Repression: Iron Fists, Velvet Gloves, and Diffuse Control
This article reviews research on political repression by social movement scholars. Four topics are discussed: (a) debates over the conceptualization of repression, the breadth of the concept, whether distinctions within the concept are productive and/or forms of repression are directly comparable, and the relationship between repression and political opportunities; (b) recent research on different types of repression, particularly protest policin…
Sociology (48 works) · Political science (45 works) · Law (37 works) · Politics (32 works) · Social Media and Politics (26 works) · Computer Science (22 works) · Social movement (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (16 works) · Public relations (16 works)