Similar But Different: Constructing Equivalent Protest Measures in Comparative Research

Abstract

Protest emerges in different forms in different countries. A strategy is presented here to deal with country-specific forms of protest by developing equivalent instead of identical measures in 13 advanced democracies around the world. The main substantive results show, first, a clear distinction between direct forms of protest and organizational actions. Yet the specific compositions of these two modes differ between countries. Second, common cross-national subsets of items comprising only three forms for direct actions (demonstrating, petitioning, boycotting) and also for organizational protest (humanitarian/charitable, self-help, consumer organizations). Third, several forms of protest can be used as country-specific expansions of the common three-item sets. Apparently, constructing equivalent instead of identical measures for protest is most important for the detection of relatively small sets of common cross-national indicators and for the accompanying disclosure of country-specific forms of protest. Due to the small percentages of protesters, applying equivalent measures and identical measures of protest largely produces the same results for the positioning of countries from a cross-national perspective.