Chapter 35 Quiz

Multiple Choice

1. Resource mobilization theory (RMT) argues that social movements form primarily because: - A) Grievances reach a critical threshold that makes inaction impossible - B) Charismatic leaders emerge to channel popular anger - C) Resources including money, organization, and networks become available to channel existing grievances - D) Political systems become sufficiently open to movement demands

Answer: C. RMT's central insight is that grievances are necessary but insufficient — movements form when resources are available to organize them, not merely when grievances intensify.

2. Political opportunity structure (POS) theory is most useful for explaining: - A) Why certain social groups develop grievances - B) Why movements form at particular moments rather than earlier, when grievances were equally intense - C) Why some movements adopt violent tactics and others do not - D) Why social media has accelerated movement growth in recent decades

Answer: B. POS theory's analytical leverage is in timing — explaining why movements emerge when political conditions are favorable, even when grievances predate those conditions.

3. In framing theory, "prognostic framing" refers to: - A) Predicting the future consequences of inaction - B) Prescribing solutions to the problem the movement has diagnosed - C) Using data and evidence to establish the credibility of movement claims - D) Identifying the specific population the movement aims to mobilize

Answer: B. Diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framing are the three tasks identified by Snow and Benford. Prognostic framing prescribes solutions — it answers "what should be done?" after the diagnostic frame answers "what is the problem?"

4. "Coverage bias" in protest event analysis refers to: - A) The tendency of protest datasets to overestimate crowd sizes - B) Systematic differences in which events appear in media-based protest databases due to news media coverage decisions - C) The bias introduced when researchers select which newspaper archives to search - D) The tendency of protest researchers to study movements they personally support

Answer: B. Coverage bias is the systematic gap between actual protest events and events captured in media-based datasets, driven by news value judgments that systematically favor large, dramatic, urban, and certain demographic profiles of protest.

5. Which of the following protest datasets uses human coders rather than automated text analysis? - A) GDELT - B) ACLED and Crowd Counting Consortium - C) Twitter Firehose Event Detection - D) Global Protest Monitor

Answer: B. Both ACLED and CCC use human coders reading source material, which produces higher accuracy than GDELT's automated coding but at much smaller scale.

6. Zeynep Tufekci's "network without power" concept describes: - A) Activist networks that lack connections to political decision-makers - B) Movements that can rapidly assemble large numbers through social media but lack the organizational depth for sustained campaigns - C) Online protest activity that fails to translate into offline mobilization - D) Social movements that avoid formal organizational structures for tactical reasons

Answer: B. Tufekci's paradox: social media lowers mobilization costs, enabling rapid scaling, but the organizational strength that comes from overcoming mobilization costs (internal governance, conflict resolution, strategic capacity) may be absent in virally-assembled movements.

7. In social network analysis of activist communities, "betweenness centrality" identifies: - A) The most popular and widely followed activists (highest follower counts) - B) Activists who are positioned at the center of a single tight-knit community - C) Nodes that serve as bridges on the shortest paths between many other pairs of nodes - D) The median position in the network hierarchy

Answer: C. Betweenness centrality measures bridging — nodes that lie on many shortest paths between other nodes are critical conduits for information flow across different parts of the network.

8. ODA's multi-source methodology improves on newspaper-only protest tracking primarily by: - A) Using more sophisticated automated text classification - B) Adding local/community media, social media, and organizational self-reporting to capture events missed by major newspapers - C) Paying human coders more to reduce transcription errors - D) Focusing only on protests that received television coverage

Answer: B. ODA's approach uses four source categories to mitigate the coverage biases of any single source type, particularly capturing smaller events, minority-community events, and rural events that major newspapers systematically miss.

Short Answer

9. Explain why the Crowd Counting Consortium's protest count for summer 2020 BLM protests (approximately 7,750 events) is lower than ODA's count (9,847 events) for the same period, and what this discrepancy tells us about protest data methodology.

Model Answer: CCC relies primarily on major newspaper coverage, which systematically misses smaller events, events in rural areas, and events organized by local rather than nationally branded organizations. ODA's additional local/community media, social media monitoring, and organizational self-reporting captures events that newspaper-based systems miss. The discrepancy (approximately 27 percent more events in ODA's data) reflects ODA's broader source coverage rather than a transcription error in either dataset. The methodological lesson is that protest counts are not objective facts but functions of data collection methodology — "how many protests occurred" depends on how you define and count protest.

10. Why does the radicalization pipeline metaphor have significant limitations as an analytical framework for understanding political violence?

Model Answer: The pipeline metaphor implies a sequential, deterministic process from moderate engagement to violent extremism, driven primarily by algorithmic content exposure. This is misleading in several ways: (1) Most people who consume extremist content never act violently, meaning content exposure is neither sufficient nor strongly predictive; (2) The metaphor de-emphasizes individual agency and the social processes (peer pressure, group identity, social ties to movement organizations) that research identifies as stronger predictors of violence; (3) It conflates media consumption with behavioral outcomes, ignoring the intervening variables (mental health, economic strain, specific mobilizing events) that mediate translation from belief to action; (4) Research on January 6 suggests participants were often ordinary citizens mobilized by specific rhetoric in a specific moment rather than individuals with long radicalization histories.

True/False with Explanation

11. True or False: Social media was the primary cause of the Arab Spring uprisings.

False. Social media played a role in information dissemination and coordination during the Arab Spring, but attributing causality primarily to social media overstates the technology's role. Grievances against authoritarian governments had existed for decades before Twitter emerged. Countries with low Twitter penetration (Libya, Syria) experienced uprisings; many countries with high Twitter use did not. Research suggests social media amplified and accelerated movements that had existing organizational infrastructure and real political grievances rather than creating those movements from scratch.

12. True or False: Larger protest events are more likely to appear in protest databases than smaller ones.

True. Size bias is one of the most consistent and well-documented forms of coverage bias in protest data. Larger events generate more media interest, produce more witnesses and reporters, and are more likely to cross the "newsworthiness" threshold for coverage. This means protest databases systematically overrepresent large, high-profile protests and underrepresent the smaller, sustained organizing that may be more consequential for long-term movement building.