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Appendix A: The Protest Event Data and Selection Bias Tests To study issue divides and other features of protest politics, I rely on protest event analysis (PEA). This kind of quantitative content analysis takes the pivotal point of the protest arena as its basic unit of data collection (that is, protest events). As stated in the introduction, this book is based on an updated and extended version of the data collected by Kriesi et al. (1995) to study new social movements in Western Europe. The data set covers protest events in the six countries under scrutiny from 1975 to 2005. It is based on a (minimalist ) strategy of data collection relying on one national quality newspaper per country and Monday editions only.Minimalist is put in parentheses, because the strategy is still very time and labor intensive By shifting from cleavages to protest events, I do not avoid complexity. “Unlike other forms of social and political activities, e.g., electoral behavior, protest is by its very nature a complex phenomenon” (Rucht et al. 1998, 9). This is also reflected in the lively (and sometimes polarized) methodological debate that PEA in general and Kriesi et al.’s (1995) minimalist strategy in particular triggered (for reviews, see Davenport 2010; Earl et al. 2004; Koopmans and Rucht 2002; Ortiz et al. 2005). One of the most contested aspects is the selection bias of the data, meaning that newspapers or other sources selectively report on protest events and do not provide a representative sample . No one would deny that a selection bias exists, but it is still under debate how significant the problem is. This appendix is structured in two sections. The first section briefly introduces the history of PEA and the main features of the present data set. The second section sums up the selection bias literature and answers (with new 147 148 Appendix A empirical tests) critics who have raised concerns about the minimalist strategy. These tests focus on four questions: (1) What do we gain when using a second newspaper? (2) What is missed when relying on Monday editions only? (3) How bad is the regional bias of the sources? and (4) Are the various national sources equally selective with respect to protest? Overall, the appendix concludes that researchers should not close their eyes to problems of selection bias, but the bias of the minimalist strategy is less pronounced than often assumed (for example, Fillieule 1996, 2007). The Minimalist Strategy of Data Collection: Limiting Sources and Editions To introduce the strategy used to collect the present data, I briefly summarize the history of PEA research. Systematic quantitative research on protest events began in the 1960s. Since then, PEA has become the main instrument with which social movement scholars retrieve and describe protest events to allow for cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses. One can identify four generations of PEA research (see Koopmans and Rucht 2002; Rucht et al. 1998). The first generation (the “initiators”) consisted of researchers who were interested in various indicators for a large number of countries, or in long-term processes of social and political change. The Handbook for Social and Political Indicators I and II by Russett et al. (1967) and by Taylor and Hudson (1972) are the most prominent examples for large N-studies. Tilly and his colleagues, by contrast, were interested in the long-term trends in strike activity and political violence (Shorter and Tilly 1974; Tilly et al. 1975).However, the authors paid relatively little attention to “the selectivity of the sources, the creation of fine-grained coding categories, and the development of well-documented rules and procedures” (Koopmans and Rucht 2002, 232). Inspired by this research, a second generation developed that made more extensive use of protest data. This research broke down the data according to various analytical criteria, which was possible because the categories used for the data collection were far more sophisticated. Path-breaking studies were Jenkins and Perrow’s (1977) work on mobilization of farmers, Kriesi et al.’s (1981) study on political activation events in Switzerland, McAdam’s (1982) case study on civil rights protests in the United States, and Tarrow’s (1989) study on the Italian protest cycle from 1965 to 1974. Furthermore, a major innovation was cross-national designs, such as that used by Kriesi et al. (1995) in their four-country study. Although the second generation was sophisticated about coding procedures and source selection, the authors did not invest a lot of time in qualifying the bias...

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