Measuring alertness The readiness of a social group to participate in protest activity

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a theory-based measure of alertness, the ability of a protest event to facilitate further contentious activity and attract higher numbers of protesters for further events. Our measure allows to pinpoint key features of contentious events and distinguish protest that leads to political instability. We use political protest in Ukraine as an empirical example to demonstrate our measure’s sensitivity to protest scale, activity and the nature of protesters’ demands1.