Profiling Insurrection: Characterizing Collective Action Using Mobile Device Data

David Van Dijcke and Austin Wright ()
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Austin Wright: University of Chicago - Harris School of Public Policy

No 2021-13, Working Papers from Becker Friedman Institute for Research In Economics

Abstract: We develop a novel approach for estimating spatially dispersed community-level participation in mass protest. This methodology is used to investigate factors associated with participation in the ‘March to Save America’ event in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021. This study combines granular location data from more than 40 million mobile devices with novel measures of community-level voting patterns, the location of organized hate groups, and the entire georeferenced digital archive of the social media platform Parler. We find evidence that partisanship, socio-political isolation, proximity to chapters of the Proud Boys organization, and the local activity on Parler are robustly associated with protest participation. Our research fills a prominent gap in the study of collective action: identifying and studying communities involved in mass-scale events that escalate into violent insurrection.

Keywords: insurrections; protests; riots; collective action; big data; cellphone; mobile devices (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pay
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bfi:wpaper:2021-13

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