Measuring Social Unrest Using Media Reports

Philip Barrett, Maximiliano Appendino, Kate Nguyen and Jorge de Leon Miranda

No 2020/129, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: We present a new index of social unrest based on counts of relevant media reports. The index consists of individual monthly time series for 130 countries, available with almost no lag, and can be easily and transparently replicated. Spikes in the index identify major events, which correspond very closely to event timelines from external sources for four major regional waves of social unrest. We show that the cross-sectional distribution of the index can be simply and precisely characterized, and that social unrest is associated with a 3 percentage point increase in the frequency of social unrest domestically and a 1 percent increase in neighbors in the next six months. Despite this, social unrest is not a better predictor of future social unrest than the country average rate.

Keywords: WP; Arabic language; appendix E; political science; Social Unrest; Protest; Media; unrest events; RSUI event coding; terms OR; RSUI index; country-horizon pair; statistical analysis; RSUI data; Public expenditure review; Middle East; North Africa; Sub-Saharan Africa; South America (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 87
Date: 2020-07-17
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Journal Article: Measuring social unrest using media reports (2022)
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