When Do Protests Succeed in Changing Public Discourse?

这项研究旨在回答这样一个问题：抗议活动何时成功地改变了公共辩论？这个问题是社会运动积极分子之间持续争论的问题，也是民主理论家感兴趣的问题，他们试图理解抗议和社会运动在提升其他被排斥的声音方面能够而且确实发挥的作用。先前对社会运动话语影响的研究要么是定性的——关注少数案例，因此限制了他们得出一般性结论的能力；要么是定量的，只关注运动的问题，而没有深入挖掘抗议是否改变了辩论的条件。该项目将采用文本即数据的方法，利用来自数字新闻来源、社交媒体和议会辩论的日益可用的文本数据，更好、更大规模地测量话语影响。具体来说，我不仅要衡量运动问题的突出性，还要衡量公共论坛讨论这些问题的方式的变化。通过这些措施，本研究将通过对多个国家的大量抗议样本进行时间序列横截面分析，寻求对各种抗议策略有效性的见解。

This research will aim to answer the question: when do protests succeed in changing public debate? This question is a matter of ongoing debate among social movement activists and is also of interest to theorists of democracy, who seek to understand the role that protests and social movements can and do play in elevating otherwise excluded voices. Previous studies of the discursive effects of social movements have tended either to be qualitative - focusing on a handful of cases and therefore limiting their ability to draw general conclusions - or if quantitative, have focused narrowly on attention to the movement's issue, and not dug deeper into whether the protest has changed the terms of the debate. This project will use text-as-data methods, capitalising on increasingly available textual data from digital news sources, social media, and parliamentary debates, to enable better and larger scale measurement of discursive impacts. Specifically, I will look to measure not just the salience of movements' issues, but also changes in the way they are discussed across public forums. With these measures, the research will seek insights into the effectiveness of various protest strategies using time-series cross-section analysis of a large sample of protests in multiple countries.