Towards building a political protest database to explain changes in the welfare state

Abstract

Despite considerable theoretical work in social sciences, ready to use resources are very limited compared to digitally available mass media resources. Thus, this project creates a political protest database from online news resources in Brazil that will be used to explain Brazilian welfare state policy changes. In this paper we present the preliminary results of a system that automatically crawls digital resources and produces a protest database, which includes events such as strikes, rallies, boycotts, protests, and riots, as well as their attributes such as location, participants, and ideology.