TY - JOUR
T1 - Social Networks and Protest Participation
T2 - Evidence from 130 Million Twitter Users
AU - Larson, Jennifer M.
AU - Nagler, Jonathan
AU - Ronen, Jonathan
AU - Tucker, Joshua A.
N1 - Funding Information:
The data were collected by the NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) laboratory (https://wp.nyu.edu/smapp/), of which Nagler and Tucker are co-directors along with Richard Bonneau and John T. Jost. The SMaPP lab is supported by the INSPIRE program of the National Science Foundation (Award SES-1248077), the New York University Global Institute for Advanced Study, the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment, and Dean Thomas Carew’s Research Investment Fund at New York University.
Publisher Copyright:
©2019, Midwest Political Science Association
PY - 2019/7
Y1 - 2019/7
N2 - Pinning down the role of social ties in the decision to protest has been notoriously elusive, largely due to data limitations. Social media and their global use by protesters offer an unprecedented opportunity to observe real-time social ties and online behavior, though often without an attendant measure of real-world behavior. We collect data on Twitter activity during the 2015 Charlie Hebdo protest in Paris, which, unusually, record real-world protest attendance and network structure measured beyond egocentric networks. We devise a test of social theories of protest that hold that participation depends on exposure to others' intentions and network position determines exposure. Our findings are strongly consistent with these theories, showing that protesters are significantly more connected to one another via direct, indirect, triadic, and reciprocated ties than comparable nonprotesters. These results offer the first large-scale empirical support for the claim that social network structure has consequences for protest participation.
AB - Pinning down the role of social ties in the decision to protest has been notoriously elusive, largely due to data limitations. Social media and their global use by protesters offer an unprecedented opportunity to observe real-time social ties and online behavior, though often without an attendant measure of real-world behavior. We collect data on Twitter activity during the 2015 Charlie Hebdo protest in Paris, which, unusually, record real-world protest attendance and network structure measured beyond egocentric networks. We devise a test of social theories of protest that hold that participation depends on exposure to others' intentions and network position determines exposure. Our findings are strongly consistent with these theories, showing that protesters are significantly more connected to one another via direct, indirect, triadic, and reciprocated ties than comparable nonprotesters. These results offer the first large-scale empirical support for the claim that social network structure has consequences for protest participation.
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U2 - 10.1111/ajps.12436
DO - 10.1111/ajps.12436
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85068370585
SN - 0092-5853
VL - 63
SP - 690
EP - 705
JO - American Journal of Political Science
JF - American Journal of Political Science
IS - 3
ER -