Description

In his seminal study of contentious politics, Sidney Tarrow conceptualized social movements as constituting a series of protest cycles. While the concept of protest cycles has received much attention in the social movements literature, its empirical operationalization remains relatively crude compared to the rich theoretical discussion. Most studies operationalize protest cycles as the total number of protest events in a given period. Drawing on recent work on event structures, this paper attempts to further develop the application of the protest cycle concept by conceptualizing social movements as a population of interlinked events and identifying events that play critical roles in historical outcomes. We demonstrate the usefulness of considering protest cycles as protest event networks with a novel dataset on South Korea’s democracy movement. In our conceptualization the nodes of the network are protest events and links are coded as present if protestors cited a specific prior event as a source of inspiration for mobilizing. Appropriating strategies developed for network analysis we ascertain which events in Korea’s democracy movement were more likely to solicit direct responses and which linked disparate event clusters. By identifying the characteristics of events that contribute to the probability of protest contagion and movement cohesion, we hope to show the usefulness of identifying direct links between events when analyzing protest events data, while providing a better understanding of the structure of protest cycles in South Korea’s democracy movement.

Paul Y. Chang is Assistant Professor of Sociology and serves on the Executive Committee of the Korea Institute at Harvard University. His primary research interest is in South Korean social and political change. He is the author of Protest Dialectics: State Repression and South Korea’s Democracy Movement (Stanford University Press 2015), and co-editor of South Korean Social Movements: From Democracy to Civil Society (Routledge 2011).