Protest and Social Movements in Political Science

The chapter maps current research on social movements and protest in political science with a special focus on studies that do not fall under “social movement literature.” It examines topics and puzzles, theoretical and analytical approaches, and methods and data that appear in political science scholarship on movements and protest using content analysis of abstracts presented at two political science conferences (APSA 2015 and ECPR 2015). It shows that the two fields—political science and social movement literature developed mainly in sociology—could considerably contribute to each other by (1) combining methodological diversity and flexibility of social movement literature with political science focus on individual-level surveys and (2) by expansion of social movement literature’s focus on political actors and repertoires other than social movements and protest.