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Repression research examines the causes and consequences of actions or policies that are meant to, or actually do, raise the costs of activism, protest, and/or social movement activity. The rise of digital and social media has brought substantial increases in attention to the repression of digital activists and movements and/or to the use of digital tools in repression, which is spread across many disciplines and areas of study. We organize and review this growing welter of research under the concept of digital repression by expanding a typology that distinguishes actions based on actor type, whether actions are overt or covert, and whether behaviors are shaped by coercion or channeling. This delineation between broadly different forms of digital repression allows researchers to develop expectations about digital repression, better understand what is “new” about digital repression in terms of explanatory factors, and better understand the consequences of digital repression.

Research on young people’s protest participation has focused on how the family, peers, and institutions support activism and micromobilization. But digital and social media usage has arguably altered how we interact and how individuals participate in politics and activism, especially among youth. This sets up an important question: Do the institutional supports (e.g., schools) and network ties (e.g., friends and family) that have historically driven micromobilization still matter in a world of pervasive digital and social media usage, particularly for youth? In this article, we analyze this question using interviews with 40 high school and university students. Rather than acting as a disruptive force, we find that digital media has become an integral part of youth micromobilization, facilitating traditional paths to activism and offering pathways to activism for those with no other options. As has been true historically, participation may also be dampened when supportive network ties are absent. We conclude with a discussion of the broader implications for micromobilization and political participation.

Social movements are constantly evolving. Protest activity waxes and wanes as movements suffer through prolonged periods of frustration, win occasional gains, and turn to new goals and issues. While theoretical models of protest activity are often sensitive to this reality, empirical models typically treat these explanations as time-invariant, rather than situated in specific moments in movements’ histories. Quite simply, we suspect that the effect of important predictors of movement activity, notably access to resources, political opportunities, repression, and competition, varies depending on the specific moment in the movement’s life course. We explore this possibility through a detailed analysis of three main periods of the American Civil Rights movement: (1) the movement’s initial success (1960–1968), its subsequent demobilization (1968–1977), and its institutionalization (1978–1995). Our analysis builds on limited work arguing for greater sensitivity to a movement’s life course when explaining protest activity. We find that the type of organizational resources that shape mobilization varies across periods, and support for prior work showing that the concurrent push and pull of institutionalization and radicalization led to demobilization. Finally, we find that coalition work motivated protest during its period of institutionalization. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and empirical implications of these findings.

Prior social movement research has focused on the role that axes of inequality – particularly race, class, gender, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) status – play for who participates and how they do so. Age is another important axis of inequality. The pervasiveness of a youth deficit model, which casts young people as deficient and requiring benevolent adult tutelage, is of particular concern for youth. This chapter assesses whether the internalization of the deficit model influences young people's activism and how they perceive their engagement. Drawing on interviews with 40 high school and college students from a southwestern US city, we find that many young people have internalized deficit-model assumptions, affecting when and how they participated. This was most evident among high school students, who limited their participation because they were “not old enough” or gravitated toward more “age-appropriate” forms of activism. Interestingly, we found college students were more willing to engage in online activism but also felt compelled to do significant research on issues before participating, thereby distancing themselves from the deficit model's assumptions of their political naivety. Finally, some participants felt discouraged by the perceived ineffectiveness of protest, which resonated with deficit model narratives of the futility of youth engagement. These findings highlight the importance of understanding the impacts of an internalized deficit model as well as considering age as an axis of inequality in activism. Youth engagement is best supported by seeing young people as capable actors with unique interests, capacities, and points of view.

Fan communities have been actively celebrating popular culture like the Harry Potter books and films, the music and fashion of Beyoncé, Korean pop sensation BTS, and the Star Wars media empire, as well as nearly every professional sports team for decades; and research on fans and fan communities has grown alongside them. The proliferation of internet and social media access has made fandom even more prominent. This chapter summarizes and synthesizes existing fandom research while highlighting how digital media have influenced fandom. First, it argues that fandom is best conceptualized as an ideal type organized around consumption, knowledge, engagement, community, identity, and emotional connection and that the internet has made each element more accessible. It then describes how fandom research has demonstrated that—as subcultures—fan communities can replicate and enact many of the same class, gender, and race inequities seen in broader society, although not identically. These inequities are evident in how society responds to different fandoms as well as fans’ experiences within their communities. Finally, it summarizes the growing literature on how fan communities have been mobilized for pro-social and activist behavior. These fan activists are adept at such behavior because they have tapped into the skills and knowledge they developed through their fandom, their proximity to mass cultural events like book and movie releases, and their communities’ potential as a source of bloc recruitment. In sum, fan communities are an important site of community and identity and an important subject of analysis in an increasingly digitized world.

Congressional hearings are a venue in which social scientists present their views and analyses before lawmakers in the United States, however quantitative data on their representation has been lacking. We present new, publicly available, data on the rates at which anthropologists, economists, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists appeared before United States congressional hearings from 1946 through 2016. We show that social scientists were present at some 10,347 hearings and testified 15,506 times. Economists testify before the US Congress far more often than other social scientists, and constitute a larger proportion of the social scientists testifying in industry and government positions. We find that social scientists' testimony is increasingly on behalf of think tanks; political scientists, in particular, have gained much more representation through think tanks. Sociology, and psychology's representation before Congress has declined considerably beginning in the 1980s. Anthropologists were the least represented. These findings show that academics are representing a more diverse set of organizations, but economists continue to be far more represented than other disciplines before the US Congress.

The prospect of using the Internet and other Big Data methods to construct event data promises to transform the field but is stymied by the lack of a coherent strategy for addressing the problem of selection. Past studies have shown that event data have significant selection problems. In terms of conventional standards of representativeness, all event data have some unknown level of selection no matter how many sources are included. We summarize recent studies of news selection and outline a strategy for reducing the risks of possible selection bias, including techniques for generating multisource event inventories, estimating larger populations, and controlling for nonrandomness. These build on a relativistic strategy for addressing event selection and the recognition that no event data set can ever be declared completely free of selection bias.

Growing interest in the use of digital technologies and a Putnam-inspired debate about youth engagement has drawn researchers from outside of the study of social movements into research on the topic. This interest in youth protest participation has, in turn, developed into a substantial area of research of its own. While offering important research contributions, we argue that these areas of scholarship are often not well grounded in classic social movement theory and research, instead focusing on new media and/or the relationship between activism and other forms of youth engagement. This chapter seeks to correct this by drawing on interviews with 40 high school and college students from a moderately sized southwestern city to examine whether traditional paths to youth activism (i.e., family, friends, and institutions) have changed or eroded as online technology use and extra-institutional engagement among youth has risen. We find that youth continue to be mobilized by supportive family, friends, and institutional opportunities, and that the students who were least engaged are missing these vital support networks. Thus, it is not so much that the process driving youth activism has changed, but that some youth are not receiving support that has been traditionally necessary to spur activism. This offers an important reminder for scholars studying youth and digital activism and youth participation more broadly that existing theory and research about traditional pathways to activism needs to be evaluated in contemporary research.

How do you get people – particularly young people – to engage with social and political issues? Activists and academics alike have been plagued by this question for some time, and answers to it have ranged from greater organizational involvement to framing. Another possibility is meeting youth where they are at; that is, connecting youth’s existing interests in popular culture with broader social problems and issues. A group that is doing just that is the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), a story-fueled nonprofit organization that turns fans into heroes. In this chapter, we trace the development of the Harry Potter fan community, the stories’ resonance with fans, and how the HPA has drawn on the community and the story for mobilization. We argue that the HPA leverages culture in two ways that are relevant for social movements and political communication scholars. The HPA is able to tap into the fan community for bloc recruitment using its ties and connections to media – in this case, the fictional story – as a point of mobilization. Additionally, the HPA is able to bloc recruit from mass society – a process they refer to as “cultural acupuncture” – by strategically connecting the story with social justice issues when cultural attention is at its peak. We conclude with a discussion of the HPA’s impact on its members and how bloc recruitment and cultural acupuncture may be relevant for other fan communities.

The majority of research on intersectionality and social movements has focused on agenda-setting or internal identity processes. However, little research has focused on the ways in which social movements present themselves as intersectional, particularly in recruitment, which is important for building inclusive movements. In this chapter, we begin to outline a theory of movement recruitment based around intersectional identities that draws on work on coalitional recruitment and concepts from framing. In particular, we argue that “identity bridging,” which occurs when two or more identities are linked during recruitment attempts, is a potential tool for inclusive and intersectional recruitment. We evaluate the extent to which movements engage in this style of recruitment using data on intersectional youth identities acknowledged on web-addressable advocacy spaces. Youth are at a critical moment in their identity development, and so it is especially important to engage them in ways that respect their developing intersectional identities. We find that, overall, most movement sites do not engage in identity bridging, and those that do rarely move beyond bridging the youth identities with one other aspect of identity. Based on our theory, this would help to explain why so many movements struggle with issues of inclusivity.

Studies of insurgency and collective action are divided between structural and dynamic explanations. Structural theories address the presence of insurgency while dynamic theories focus on the frequency of insurgent actions. Yet prior studies often treat these arguments additively, leaving unclear how structural and dynamic processes affect these different aspects of insurgency. This study addresses this division by using zero-inflated negative binomial regression to examine in a single equation both the presence and the count of Islamist insurgency in Egyptian governorates between 1986 and 1999. We test political economy, moral economy, and cultural clash explanations of the presence of insurgency alongside political dynamics arguments about repression and exclusion to explain the count of attacks. Looking at the structural side of this equation, we find that communities with high rates of poverty, child mortality, cultural conservatism in terms of low contraceptive prevalence, and greater urban density are more likely to support insurgency. Looking at the dynamic side, parliamentary exclusion, security sweeps, and executions affect the count of attacks along with spatial diffusion from neighboring governorates. The culturally conservative region of Upper Egypt, which has a history of social and political marginality and opposition, provided a seedbed of insurgent support but this challenge broke down over time as repression intensified and exclusion was relaxed. These findings underscore the point that the presence of and the intensity of insurgency are distinct and driven by different factors. There are notable methodological and theoretical advantages to distinguishing between presence and count to better understand when and where insurgencies develop and their level of collective action.

Recent work in the field of social movements has argued for the importance of threat as a factor that explains the emergence of collective action. However, threat remains poorly specified and understood. This article seeks to refine the concept of threat and its role in mobilization with an examination of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Our study design compares two cases where resistance took place (the Warsaw Ghetto and the Sobibór death camp) with two cases where resistance did not occur (the Łódź Ghetto and the Bełżec death camp). Our comparison of these cases finds that mass resistance occurred only when and where Jews correctly assessed the threats facing them. We use these findings to identify five dimensions of threat: severity, temporality, applicability, malleability, and credibility. We argue that recognizing these dimensions and the ways they interact is especially useful for understanding action in repressive contexts.

How and why do movements transition from everyday resistance to overt collective action? This article examines this question taking repressive environments and threat as an important case in point. Drawing on primary and secondary data sources, I offer comparative insights on resistance group dynamics and perceptions of threat in three Nazi death camps—Sobibór, Treblinka, and Auschwitz—between 1941 and 1945. Prisoners formed resistance groups at each camp, but collective revolt occurred in only certain cases: when the collective perception of threat at a given camp was viewed as both immediate and lethal. The interpretation of changing, threatening conditions, and an understanding of structural and interactional opportunities for group identity and tactical strategizing, are vital for understanding collective action in repressive environments. I conclude by discussing these lessons pertaining to threat and their implications for repressive contexts and broader social movement theorizing.

Previous analyses of the relationship between dissent and repression have turned up mixed, and often conflicting, results. Although research on the effect of repression on dissent has been inconsistent, it becomes obvious that time and country variation does matter: the effects of dissent and repression do not occur in a social vacuum. Our analyses seek to determine what country-level contextual variables influence levels of nonviolent and violent dissent, as well as nonviolent and violent repression. We include a battery of variables describing domestic economic and political conditions, sociodemographics, and global linkages. We test specific hypotheses about these potential determinants of various forms of dissent and repression by using data on 530 event-weeks of the period 1994-2004 across 97 countries. We find that proximity to the center of the world polity network and capacity for state terror have an effect on both dissent and repression, and international, political, and economic factors have an...

This course provides an undergraduate level introduction to the study of youth political socialization and political activism. Young people are the backbone of most social movements from the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements to more contemporary examples like Black Lives Matter, #Occupy, and the anti-gun violence movement. The first half of the course presents an overview of theories of youth political socialization, political participation, and their role in social movements. The course specifically explores concerns about the state of youth political participation and the realities of participation, theories regarding how youth are socialized to participate in politics (and the impediments to participation), the history of youth in social movements (specifically why youth and college campuses are so important). The second half builds on this structure to review areas where youth are bringing new energy to political participation. The syllabus includes discussion in how youth have updated tactics, continue to redefine what counts as political, and incorporate new (intersectionality) and old (economic inequality) concerns into movements. The course is built around a midterm and final exam, as well as a research paper on a youth-oriented social movement that is broken up into several smaller "proposals" throughout the semester. Students are also assessed on their participation in class discussion over the substantive issues. The course serves as a point of connection between courses on youth and society, political sociology, political communication, and social movements.