Review of Clark/Regan (2016): Mass Mobilization Project

The Mass Mobilization Project is a project by David H. Clark and Patrick M. Regan, funded by the Political Instability Task Force. It covers 10.000+ anti-government protests from around the globe (162 countries) (3) in the time period from 1990-2020, with the latest version update including formerly missing notes for 2700+ cases (2). This dataset provides descriptions on the happenings at protest events against governments as well as information on the protester demands and government responses (Clark & Regan 2015: 2). They aim to include any protest event that targets (a countries own) government with at least 50 participants, while excluding (a) inter-communal demonstrations, as these do not target the government, (b) rebel attacks or other armed protests, since they are no longer an expression of demand for change but rather a means of acquiring said change by force and (c) political rallies as these are considered a pro-state action (Clark & Regan 2015: 3-4). Lexis-Nexis was utilized as the source of information. It was used to search for newspaper reports while focusing on four major publications: The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor and the Times of London (Clark & Regan 2015: 2-3). Of the 17.000+ total entries in this dataset, there are over 1.500+ events listed for the countries of Eastern Europe, South Caucasus and Central Asia covered by Discuss Data. As of summer 2024, it is not clear whether work on the data collection is continuing. The data review includes both a link to the official Mass Mobilization Project website as well as a link to the Harvard Dataverse website from which both the dataset and the Mass Mobilization Data Project Codebook and User's Manual are available for download.