A Protest Event Dataset for Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand (1985-2005)
Recent waves of mass demonstrations around the world have attracted renewed scholarly and political attention to the question of the role of grassroot movements in political change. In explaining political transition processes, the democratization literature usually attributes a prominent role to elite actors. Influential democratization scholars depict the transition process as a process of negotiation and pact-building between key elite actors. By contrast, mass movements are seen as a rather passive element in the process that can be mobilized and demobilized by the elite.
This project challenges the democratization literature's narrow focus on the political elite and aims at combining it with insights from the social movement literature. The experience of newly democratized countries in East and Southeast Asia provides an interesting empirical basis to study how key stages in the democratization process are related to mass mobilization. Relying on a newly constructed dataset of protest events (1985–2005), the project analyzes similarities and differences between mass mobilization and respective actions and responses by elite actors in three countries in the region, namely Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand.