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What Is Protest? Concept and Measurement

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Political Protest in Western Europe

Part of the book series: Contributions to Political Science ((CPS))

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Abstract

This chapter outlines the dependent variable used in this volume – a summary measure of political protest – and provides an assessment of its country equivalence across Western Europe. Assessing measurement equivalence is important to make sure that a reliable measure is used, so to compare the levels of political protest in different contexts. Accordingly, the chapter provides an empirical tool to test the equivalence of an index of political protest across different contexts, also using different sources of survey data, and shows how to maximize the comparability of the measure employed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The standard technique is multi-group factor analysis (Bollen 1989).

  2. 2.

    Van Schuur (2003) uses this example, with six items, to introduce Mokken Scale Analysis.

  3. 3.

    Items are ordered as in the European Values Survey questionnaire. In Fig. 2.1 the items are rescaled to range between zero and one. Lighter and darker colors indicate, respectively, lower and higher scores.

  4. 4.

    An example of such cross-national equivalence of a Mokken scale is provided in Van der Meer et al. (2009).

  5. 5.

    In the International Social Survey Programme Belgium is Flanders and Germany is West Germany.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, LUISS “Guido Carli”, Rome, Italy

    Mario Quaranta

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  1. Mario Quaranta
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Quaranta, M. (2015). What Is Protest? Concept and Measurement. In: Political Protest in Western Europe. Contributions to Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22162-5_2

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