The Activists

I want to bring some attention (and maybe a bit of money) to a film project called "The Activists: War, Peace, and Politics in the Streets." The film is a documentary of political activism in the United States over the past few years, focusing mainly on anti-war activism. Political scientist Michael Heaney, a co-author of mine, is one of the producers of the film, and he conducted some of the interviews while we were surveying protesters at the Democratic convention in 2008.

The film is in post-production now and they need a few thousand more dollars to get this thing out the door. If you'd like to help, please check it out.

Some like it cold

Nate Silver examined the turnout at various Occupy Wall Street rallies during this past Saturday. He notes a couple of reasons why more people might turn out in one city than in another, including racial politics, organizational technology, and city political structures. Here's another idea: temperature. Does cold weather keep people indoors?

To answer this question, I used Silver's rally turnout estimates (Excel file) for the 36 largest rallies and divided them by each city's 2010 population to get a per capita estimate. Then I collected high temperature data for each city on that date. Here's the result:

Quite the opposite from expected: the protesters like cold weather! Of course, the coldest weather for any of these cities that day was in the 50s -- this graph might look quite different if the protests were held a month from now. (In general, I'd advise starting massive outdoor social movements in the spring rather than the fall.)

Also, there's a big heteroskedasticity problem in the data, and there just aren't many cases above 85 degrees. But dammit, I collected that data, and I was going to put the scatterplot up no matter what it said.

Riots ain't so pretty when they're closer to home

Some interesting observations about the British riots and social media from John Hendrickson:

Unlike the Middle East uprisings earlier this year, the relationship between this week's riots in Britain and Facebook, Twitter and other social-media platforms is not entirely clear.

[...]

Follow the story on social media, and the rioting looks less like a direct response to a single shooting than an excuse for restless youth to act out during a time of summer vacation and unemployment — and to stay glued to their mobile phones.

I don't presume to be an expert on either the Arab Spring or the current rioting in Britain, but let me just suggest that the differences described above have more to do with the observer than with the participants.  For an English-speaking reporter in the States (and I'm not singling out Hendrickson here) trying to cover a riot in Egypt, it's much easier to fall back on a heuristic like "Young freedom-seekers rising up against an unjust tyrant," and to comb through the very small percentage of organizational speech conveyed in English tweets. The same reporter trying to understand events in Britain, however, has greater familiarity with the organization of Western society and can read a much higher percentage of the relevant communication. Suddenly the components and causes of a riot don't seem quite so clear. The riot seems more complex because the observer has so much more data and context and doesn't need to rely as much on heuristics.

As it turns out, there are lots of reasons people participate in a riot. Some people are trying to bring down a tyrannical system. Some want to see what all the noise is. Some notice that the police are busy elsewhere and decide to grab a television from an electronics store. I doubt there has ever been a perfectly noble or a perfectly hedonistic riot. The closer you get, the more complicated it seems.

On the value of street protest

Markos Moulitsas, on Twitter:

#HCR passage will prove, once again, that street protests are pretty ineffective. It was time for Cons to learn that lesson

I'm not sure they were totally ineffective here.  No, the protests didn't stop health reform from passing, but they did slow it down for a while, and they reinforced total GOP opposition (although that might have happened anyway).

The inevitable comparison is to the civil rights movement.  We often credit protests for helping that movement succeed.  Why can't other groups do that today?

Well, for one thing, most protests we see just don't look like the civil rights movement.  Think of the 1963 march on Washington, which took place on a work day and involved hundreds of thousands of well dressed people all carrying professionally made signs showing just a handful of pre-approved messages.  Think of the Selma march or the lunch counter sit-ins, which involved substantial physical risk for participants.

Today's protests, whether it's tea partiers gathered in opposition to taxation or something or anti-war types opposing the invasion of Iraq, don't have nearly that level of discipline or physical risk.  There's no reason for an observer to admire anything that these protesters are doing.  They're simply getting together and speaking because something is going on that they don't like and they don't want to keep silent about it.  That's certainly fine and understandable, but it's hard to see how that changes minds.