IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bfi/wpaper/2021-13.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Profiling Insurrection: Characterizing Collective Action Using Mobile Device Data

Author

Listed:
  • David Van Dijcke

    (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)

  • Austin L. Wright

    (University of Chicago - Harris School of Public Policy)

Abstract

We develop a novel approach for estimating spatially dispersed community-level participation in mass protest. This methodology is used to investigate factors associated with participation in the ‘March to Save America’ event in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021. This study combines granular location data from more than 40 million mobile devices with novel measures of community-level voting patterns, the location of organized hate groups, and the entire georeferenced digital archive of the social media platform Parler. We find evidence that partisanship, socio-political isolation, proximity to chapters of the Proud Boys organization, and the local activity on Parler are robustly associated with protest participation. Our research fills a prominent gap in the study of collective action: identifying and studying communities involved in mass-scale events that escalate into violent insurrection.

Suggested Citation

  • David Van Dijcke & Austin L. Wright, 2021. "Profiling Insurrection: Characterizing Collective Action Using Mobile Device Data," Working Papers 2021-13, Becker Friedman Institute for Research In Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:bfi:wpaper:2021-13
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://repec.bfi.uchicago.edu/RePEc/pdfs/BFI_WP_2021-13.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Grolemund, Garrett & Wickham, Hadley, 2011. "Dates and Times Made Easy with lubridate," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 40(i03).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Iacoella, Francesco & Justino, Patrica & Martorano, Bruno, 2021. "Do pandemics lead to rebellion? Policy responses to COVID-19, inequality, and protests in the USA," MERIT Working Papers 2021-014, United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Laha, A. K. & Putatunda, Sayan, 2017. "Travel Time Prediction for Taxi-GPS Data Streams," IIMA Working Papers WP 2017-03-03, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Research and Publication Department.
    2. Fraccaroli, Nicolò & Giovannini, Alessandro & Jamet, Jean-François & Persson, Eric, 2022. "Ideology and monetary policy. The role of political parties’ stances in the European Central Bank’s parliamentary hearings," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 74(C).
    3. Michael A Ruderman & Deirdra F Wilson & Savanna Reid, 2015. "Does Prison Crowding Predict Higher Rates of Substance Use Related Parole Violations? A Recurrent Events Multi-Level Survival Analysis," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(10), pages 1-19, October.
    4. Loke Schmalensee & Pauline Caillault & Katrín Hulda Gunnarsdóttir & Karl Gotthard & Philipp Lehmann, 2023. "Seasonal specialization drives divergent population dynamics in two closely related butterflies," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 14(1), pages 1-13, December.
    5. repec:irf:wpaper:010 is not listed on IDEAS
    6. Verena K. Brändle & Olga Eisele, 2023. "A Thin Line: Governmental Border Communication in Times of European Crises," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 61(3), pages 597-615, May.
    7. Haider, Saira M. & Benscoter, Allison M. & Pearlstine, Leonard & D'Acunto, Laura E. & Romañach, Stephanie S., 2021. "Landscape-scale drivers of endangered Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow (Ammospiza maritima mirabilis) presence using an ensemble modeling approach," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 461(C).
    8. Nicholas Tierney & Dianne Cook, 2018. "Expanding tidy data principles to facilitate missing data exploration, visualization and assessment of imputations," Monash Econometrics and Business Statistics Working Papers 14/18, Monash University, Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics.
    9. Gregory Eady & Tom Paskhalis & Jan Zilinsky & Richard Bonneau & Jonathan Nagler & Joshua A. Tucker, 2023. "Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 14(1), pages 1-11, December.
    10. Rieger, Jonas & von Nordheim, Gerret, 2021. "corona100d: German-language Twitter dataset of the first 100 days after Chancellor Merkel addressed the coronavirus outbreak on TV," DoCMA Working Papers 4, TU Dortmund University, Dortmund Center for Data-based Media Analysis (DoCMA).
    11. Christian Thiele & Gerrit Hirschfeld & Ruth Brachel, 2021. "Clinical trial registries as Scientometric data: A novel solution for linking and deduplicating clinical trials from multiple registries," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(12), pages 9733-9750, December.
    12. Braun, Michael T. & Adams, Nicole B. & O'Grady, Courtney E. & Miller, Deserai L. & Bystrinski, Jonathan, 2020. "An exploration of youth physically restrained in mental health residential treatment centers," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 110(C).
    13. Arthur Novaes de Amorim & Rob Deardon & Vineet Saini, 2021. "A stacked ensemble method for forecasting influenza-like illness visit volumes at emergency departments," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(3), pages 1-15, March.
    14. Fraccaroli, Nicolò & Giovannini, Alessandro & Jamet, Jean-Francois & Persson, Eric, 2022. "Ideology and monetary policy: the role of political parties’ stances in the ECB’s parliamentary hearings," Working Paper Series 2655, European Central Bank.
    15. Jack Sutton & Golnaz Shahtahmassebi & Haroldo V Ribeiro & Quentin S Hanley, 2022. "Population density and spreading of COVID-19 in England and Wales," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 17(3), pages 1-19, March.
    16. Laha, A. K. & Putatunda, Sayan, 2017. "Real Time Location Prediction with Taxi-GPS Data Streams," IIMA Working Papers WP 2017-03-02, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Research and Publication Department.
    17. Carrie M. Leslie & Alva I. Strand & Elizabeth A. Ross & Giovanni Tolentino Ramos & Eli S. Bridge & Phillip B. Chilson & Christopher E. Anderson, 2021. "Shifting the Balance among the ‘Three Rs of Sustainability:’ What Motivates Reducing and Reusing?," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(18), pages 1-12, September.
    18. Jenni A. Shearston & A. Mychal Johnson & Arce Domingo-Relloso & Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou & Diana Hernández & James Ross & Steven N. Chillrud & Markus Hilpert, 2020. "Opening a Large Delivery Service Warehouse in the South Bronx: Impacts on Traffic, Air Pollution, and Noise," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(9), pages 1-19, May.
    19. Alexandre Vasconcelos Lima & Rogério Boueri Miranda & Mathias Schneid Tessmann, 2022. "Evaluation of the Future Price of Brazilian Commodities as a Predictor of the Price of the Spot Market," International Journal of Economics and Finance, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 14(4), pages 1-51, April.
    20. Lykou, R. & Tsaklidis, G. & Papadimitriou, E., 2020. "Change point analysis on the Corinth Gulf (Greece) seismicity," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 541(C).
    21. Behm, Svenia & Haupt, Harry, 2020. "Predictability of hourly nitrogen dioxide concentration," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 428(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    insurrections; protests; riots; collective action; big data; cellphone; mobile devices;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bfi:wpaper:2021-13. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Toni Shears (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/mfichus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.