Analysis of Events in the Study of Collective Action

Recent research on collective action has focused on the occurrence, timing, and sequencing of such events as regime changes, riots, revolutions, protests, and the founding of social movement organizations. Event analysis allows information on the duration, number of participants, presence of violence, or outcome of some particular type of collective action to be compared across social systems or across time periods. This review considers issues of definition, measurement, and methods of estimation in event analysis. It also compares two general varieties of event analysis: approaches that model the dynamics of collective action as a process, and those that do not. A process-oriented approach evaluates how time and covariates (including past events) affect the timing and sequence of repeatable events, and it attempts to explain how events unfold over time. The nonprocess approaches summarize static relationships between levels or characteristics of units and some type of event count.