23. June 2025
by shaunss
0 comments
Protest event analysis (PEA) is the core method to understand spatial patterns and temporal dynamics of protest. We show how Large Language Models (LLM) can be used to automate the classification of protest events and of political event data more broadly with levels of accuracy comparable to humans, while reducing necessary annotation time by several orders of magnitude.
Continue Reading →
23. March 2025
by shaunss
0 comments
This article explains the divergent trajectories of anti-far-right mobilization in two German cities: the campaign against the extreme-right movement Pegida in Dresden and its offshoot, Legida, in Leipzig.
Continue Reading →
1. March 2025
by shaunss
0 comments
Can we infer individual characteristics of protest participants by examining the demonstrations they go to? Public debate and academic literature both tend to make such inferences from the meso- to the micro-level. This article tests whether this practice is empirically warranted.
Continue Reading →
19. July 2024
by shaunss
0 comments
In exploring protest dynamics, Protest Event Analysis (PEA) has proven an indispensable analytic tool. Despite various improvements, PEA faces continuous challenges, notably the reproduction of media-specific selection biases. This research note aims to contribute to the literature seeking to mitigate these issues by exploring the potential of PEA based on local newspaper data, which tend to be less selective in their protest reporting.
Continue Reading →
19. July 2024
by shaunss
0 comments
The opinions of political actors (e.g., politicians, parties, organizations) expressed through claims are the core elements of political debates and decision-making. Political actors communicate through different channels: parties publish manifestos for major elections, while individual actors make statements on a day-to-day basis as reflected in the media. These two channels offer different approaches for analysis: Manifestos, on the one hand, are useful to characterize the parties’ positions at a global ideological level over time. In contrast, individual statements can be collected to analyze debates in particular policy domains on a fine-grained level, in terms of individual actors and claims. In this article, we summarize a series of studies we have carried out.
16. December 2022
by shaunss
0 comments
The 2011 policy pivot of the German government, from extending nuclear power plants terms to securing their shutdown for 2022, cannot be explained without looking at how the German political discourse network shifted in the months following Fukushima. This paper seeks to model and identify mechanisms that help explain how the two-mode network of political actors’ support for claims developed.
Continue Reading →
15. March 2022
by shaunss
0 comments
Bremens Nachkriegsgeschichte ist reich an Protesten, deren Häufigkeit und thematische Bandbreite seit den 1960er Jahren zugenommen hat. Seitdem sind Proteste zum normalen Bestandteil politischer Partizipation in Bremen geworden.
Continue Reading →
8. December 2021
by shaunss
0 comments
This paper analyses the socio-demographic attributes and political attitudes of protesters in Germany. In doing so, the paper studies participation at demonstrations, one of the key forms of non-electoral political participation in Germany and a central political arena in which to negotiate political and cultural conflicts.
Continue Reading →