CONTEXTUALIZING CONTESTATION: FRAMEWORK, DESIGN, AND DATA *

This article presents the theoretical underpinnings, design, methods, and measures of the project, Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation. This effort examines street demonstrations that vary in atmosphere, organization, and target. The project particularly focuses on participants, exploring who participates, and why and how people got involved. Data are collected before, during, and after a number of demonstrations, and captures the entire “demonstration moment.” We develop standardized measures and techniques for sampling and data collection at the individual demonstrator level and at the contexual level. Evidence was gathered not only from the demonstrators but also from police, organizers, and the mass media. Data-gathering efforts were standardized through identical methods, questionnaires, fact sheets, and content analysis protocols. The CCC project examines demonstrations in Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Spain, Switzerland, and Sweden between 2009 and 2012. Teams from Italy, Mexico, and the Czech Republic joined the project at a later stage. The project has covered 61 demonstrations and 12,993 questionnaires have been completed to date. Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation project (CCC) is set up to combine interview data from individual demonstration participants with multilayered con-textual data. This combination provides insight into the relationship between individual participation and meaningful contextual differences. To that end, we developed standardized measures and techniques for sampling and data collection both at the individual demonstrator level and the context level (Klandermans, van Stekelenburg, van Troost, van Leeuwen, Walgrave, Verhulst, van Laer and Wouters 2010). This essay presents the CCC project, its theoretical underpinnings, design, methods, and measures. To start, we briefly elaborate upon the phenomenon of street demonstrations. 1 The