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Since its inception, the Tea Party's widely recognized ideological niche was its emphasis was on fiscal responsibility and government spending. No systematic effort, however, has been devoted to tracing the evolution of the movement's discourse. This study addresses that limitation by analyzing an exhaustive enumeration of 90,522 blog posts published by five Tea Party umbrella groups between February 10, 2009 and December 10, 2018. Our results indicate that early Tea Party discourse primarily emphasized a grassroots effort to reduce domestic spending and taxation, framing the movement as representing the will and values of the American people. As the movement evolved, however, the volume of its discourse seriously declined, and a broader set of themes such as Christianity, energy and environmental issues, and foreign policy became common talking points. Over time, the Tea Party's more recently anemic political discourse came to mirror the claims articulated by the broader conservative movement. As a consequence, the Tea Party lost its distinctive voice hastening its declining impact on American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of literature points to a conservative media echo chamber, where a small number of outlets extensively cover issues in ways that benefits the Republican Party. One beneficiary of this echo chamber has been the Tea Party, which received extensive positive media attention from conservative sources, particularly Fox News. Little research, however, has compared the production and content of media attention to the Tea Party by conservative and non-conservative outlets, nor examined how movement generated media replicates or differs from these sources. Using a sample of 28,123 blog posts drawn from three Tea Party umbrella groups, 70,834 newspaper articles covering the Tea Party, and 33,189 references to the Tea Party on Fox News, we estimate topic models to analyze the substantive content of movement discourse and media coverage between 2009 and 2014. The results show that not only do different types of media vary in the overall frequency of content production, each source also follows a sharply distinct topical emphasis as well. Estimates from a time series negative binomial regression analysis further indicates that although to some degree the various types of media shape the frequency of content production of each other, the larger attention cycles are quite distinct across sources, indicating that, surprisingly, Tea Party blogs operate largely outside the conservative media echo chamber. We suggest that this is linked to Tea Party dissatisfaction with the Republican Party, and the widespread fragmentation of local chapters organizing under the Tea Party banner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009 the Tea Party movement burst on the U.S. scene with a massive protest in Washington, DC preceded by more than a thousand local Tax Day protests on April 15, 2009 in communities across the nation. Public protest had, since the 1960's, been a common tactic of progressive groups, but more rarely used by conservative groups. Many of the organizers committed to making Tax Day Tea Parties an annual event, and there were more than 650 protests again in 2010. The Tea Party's commitment to protest tactics, however, has proven to be short lived. Using evidence combining media coverage of the tax day protests in 452 daily newspapers combined with internet traces of events, we show that the flood of protests in 2009 has dwindled to a mere trickle in recent years. Drawing on interviews and surveys with local Tea Party leaders, we describe how, and why in its leader's own words, the Tea Party movement moved so quickly from the streets to the pursuit of more conventional forms of political influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have suggested that the policing of protest has become less aggressive since the 1960s wave of contention. While widely accepted, studies affirming a softening of police conduct have focused on national trends despite widespread awareness of an uneven diffusion of police tactics across the United States. This study examines the temporal trends in New York, NY between 1960 and 2006 to evaluate how and why the dominant strategies of protest policing have changed over time. Drawing on the widespread privatization of public space in New York during the 1980s coupled with the adoption of Broken Windows crime control strategies, I develop an alternative explanation of the temporal dynamics of protest policing that is based on policy contagion, or the unintentional spillover effects that policy decisions unrelated to protest policing may nonetheless have on police conduct. Using Bayesian multilevel logistic regression models and a sample of 6,147 protest events occurring in New York, NY between 1960 and 2006, I confirm that the prevalence of arrests and other forms of police force have increased over time even though illegal or other highly contentious tactics have declined. The results additionally do not suggest that there is a direct relationship between crime rates and either arrests or the use of force. This indicates that the political construction and control of crime is more important than the absolute amount of crime, which is consistent with the proposed policy contagion explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The negotiated management and strategic incapacitation models of protest policing are outlined and potential variability in police response to protest is examined based on differences in protestor tactics, the characteristics of the challenging group, and the level of threat of the protest event. Using 1,152 demonstrations that took place in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, Canada between 1998 and 2004, logistic regression models were estimated to examine arrest patterns. Results suggest that even when tactics utilized by the demonstrators are accounted for, the degree to which the challenging group pre-mobilized or is countercultural significantly influences arrests. The results also provide preliminary evidence suggesting a positive relationship between both the WTO protest in Seattle and the 9/11 attacks on the United States and subsequent use of arrests. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of social movements have long called attention to the differences between those protest events that gain media coverage and those that are not covered. However, although we know much about which protest events are covered in the media, we know considerably less about the differences in prominence among those events that do gain coverage. We extend the literature on mass media coverage of social movements by examining how event characteristics affect page location within a newspaper by examining protest events covered in the New York Times between 1960 and 1990. Using multinomial logistic regression, we develop an account of the editorial decisions regarding the placement of an event within the paper's pages. We find that such decisions are most heavily influenced by the amount of conflict associated with the event (violence, property damage, arrests, and the use of contentious protest tactics). Importantly, we also find that larger events and those located in the nation's capitol are more likely to be placed on the front page, whereas corporate-targeted events are generally kept off of the front page. Overall we find that the Times editors tend to highlight disruptive protest, while downplaying anti-corporate claims-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On April 15, 2009, 1,022 Tax Day Tea Party (TDTP) protests took place across the United States. Though the Tea Party movement has increasingly become a force in contemporary U.S. politics, it has been the subject of little scholarly attention. This research analyzes the spatial distribution of the TDTP gatherings using a comprehensive listing of the location of each protest drawn from official Tea Party listings and local newspaper coverage. We argue that a major factor underlying the movement's success was the creation of highly resonant frames linking the central claims of the Tea Party to the economic recession beginning in 2007. Furthermore, the Tea Party was able to capitalize on relatively extensive positive media coverage that further promoted their key frames, coupled with patronage by several conservative leaders and Republican politicians. Results from a county-level Bayesian negative binomial regression analysis suggest that higher levels of mobilization occurred in counties with higher unemployment rates and lower median incomes, but not in counties with notably high or low levels of poverty. TDTP demonstrations were also increasingly likely to occur in counties more supportive of the Republican Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protest policing scholarship has predominantly focused on the effect of situational threats such as civil disobedience or violence on police action. This has resulted in a theoretical understanding of protest control that is largely autonomous from broader trends in formal state-sponsored social control. Using variation in protest policing across large American cities, I demonstrate that a focus on smaller analytic units can provide a viable way to link protest policing to social structural factors. Particular attention is paid to institutional change in police departments, shifting police training regimens and strategies, and the link between conservatism and punitiveness. Using a sample of 8,355 protest events in 16 major U.S. cities, I use a series of statistical models predicting arrests. The results suggest that even after accounting for the behaviors of the protestors, there remains considerable city-level variability in protest policing. Furthermore, the results suggest that more liberal cities are more repressive, that protest in wealthier cities is comparatively privileged, and that the adoption of Broken Windows policing strategies in many major cities may result in more aggressive protest control strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protest policing scholars have theorized a general decline in more coercive police tactics since the 1960s. Unfortunately, few studies directly examine the evolution of protest control to gauge the empirical support for this pattern. To address this gap in the literature, we use semiparametric logistic regression analysis to examine patterns in police presence, the use of arrests, and the use of force at over 15,000 protests covered by the New York Times between 1960 and 1995. Using a nonparametric operationalization of time, we systematically assess how protest policing has changed, and whether the trends we observe are similar across each of the tactics we examine. While our results confirm that there has been an absolute decline in more heavy-handed policing, there are different evolutionary logics for each police tactic we investigate. In addition, our results raise the possibility that an overall decrease in more coercive protest control may simply be a function of lower levels of police presence at protest events, and not necessarily due to the development of a more amicable protest management strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]