Marriage has come to be center-stage in a semiotic and ideological “culture war.” The issue of same-sex marriage has emerged as a defining political argument shaping the manner by which the contemporary gay rights movement positions itself. In Georgia’s 2004 election, a constitutional amendment was proposed defining marriage as legal unions between only biological men and women. In response, campaigns were organized by both supporters and opponents to same-sex marriage. This thesis examines the politics of spectacle at play through which both sides of this argument positioned themselves. This thesis employs anthropological theory, queer theory and public sphere literature to illuminate the campaign against same-sex marriage as one of not only the denial of citizenship rights, but of identity recognition. The methods of theatricality employed by both sides of this debate are examined alongside the manners by which they represented themselves as legitimate voices in the fight over “marriage.”

This study addresses the media depiction of professional athletes involvement in protest and its impact for public consumption. This paper will further seek to analyze the role of social media and its framing of political protest specifically within professional sports. The purpose of this research is to study the progression in professional athletes’ participation in protest and through textual analysis aim to understand how newspapers frame an athlete’s message. The more recent study that will be used as a frame of reference is the newspaper coverage on the Kaepernick protest and the dual relationship that the local/national media and social media had in its framing and impact on sports and society. There is existing work that has focused on the up’s and down’s for African Americans in sports, but those sources only highlight small political protest in professional sports without highlighting newspaper coverage. This study will display through three top nationally circulated newspaper companies (and the top circulated newspaper in San Francisco where the Kaepernick protest started) how the media illustrates protest and the reaction to protest through the lens of social media.

The purpose of this thesis is to study the relationship between prevalence of swing voters and the occurrence of political protest. Taking a Rational Choice approach, I hypothesize that fewer swing voters will lead to more protests, because it would incentivize polarizing behavior by political candidates. The hypothesis is tested using protest data from US congressional districts during six months of 2020 as the dependent variable, and the concept of voter elasticity as the main independent variable in a multiple regression analysis, along with various control variables. The results tentatively indicate that the hypothesis is correct, but exhibit high levels of uncertainty, highlighting potential for future research.

This thesis investigates the role of network structure, brokerage, and framing in high-risk collective action. I use the protest movement that emerged in Russia following falsified national elections in 2011 and 2012 as an empirical case study. I draw on a unique dataset of nearly 30,000 online documents and the linking structure of over 3,500 Russian Web sites. I employ a range of computational social science methods, including Exponential Random Graph Modeling, an advanced statistical model for social networks, social network analysis, machine learning, and latent semantic analysis. I address three research questions in this thesis. The first asks if a protest network challenging a hybrid regime will have a polycentric or hierarchical structure, and if that structure changes over time. Polycentric networks are conducive to high-risk collective action and are robust to the targeted removal of key nodes, while hierarchical networks can more easily mobilize protesters and spread information. I find that the Russian protest network has a polycentric structure only at the beginning of the protests, and moves towards a less effective hierarchical structure as the movement loses popular support. The second research question seeks to understand if brokered text is actually novel, and if that text is more novel in polycentric networks than in hierarchical ones. Brokers are the individuals or nodes in a network that connect disparate groups through weak ties and close structural holes. Brokers are advantageous because they have access to and spread novel information. I find that the text among nodes in brokered relationships is indeed novel, but that information novelty decreases when networks have a hierarchical structure. The last research question asks if a protest movement in a high-risk political setting can be more successful than the government at spreading its preferred frames, and within such a movement, whether moderate or extremist framing is more prevalent. I find that the opposition is far more effective than the government in spreading its frames, even when the government organizes massive counter protests. Within the movement, moderates are more likely to have their framing adopted online than extremists, unless violence occurs at protests. The findings suggest that movements should build flatter, more diffuse networks by ensuring that brokers tie together diverse protest constituencies. The findings also provide evidence against those who claim that authoritarian governments are more effective in shaping online discourse than oppositional movements, and also suggest that movements should advance moderate framing in order to attract a wider base of support among the general population.

[pt] Apesar de não ser um fenômeno recente, os protestos políticos tem ocorrido mais frenquentemente em diversas democracias do mundo. Neste contexto, é importante analisar se eles de fato são um instrumento efetivo através do qual os cidadãos podem afetar variáveis políticas e garantir que suas preferências sejam refletidas no âmbito político. Neste trabalho I estudo os efeitos dos protestos que ocorreram no Brasil em junho de 2013, olhando tanto para o comportamento de eleitores e de políticos. Primeiramente, usando dados das eleições a nível municipal, eu mostro que os protestos estão associados com uma diminuição nas taxas de comparecimento e um aumento no percentual de votos de protestos (votos nulos). Além disso, os protestos afetaram a distribuição de votos: há uma correlação negativa entre votos em incumbentes e a incidência de protestos. Com respeito ao efeito nos políticos, eu foco minha análise na Câmara dos Deputados e analiso se os protestos tiveram algum efeito sobre o comportamento ds deputados federais. Usando uma abordagem de diferença-em-diferença não tradicional, eu mostro que os protestos não afetaram todas as dimensões relevantes da performance dos legisladores, como presença em plenário, alocação de emedas parlamentares e elaboração de leis. No entanto, há evidência de efeitos heterogêneos com relação a incentivos à reeleição e posição relativa na coalizão. / [en] Although political protests are not a new political phenomenon, they are happening more frequently in democracies all over the world. In this context, it is important to study whether they are an effective instrument through which citizens can affect political outcomes and ensure that their preferences are reflected in politics. In this work, I analyze the effects of the protests that took place in Brazil in 2013, looking both of voters and politicians behavior. First, using data on elections at the municipal level, I show that the protests are associated with a decrease in turnout rate and an increase in the share of protest votes (the null votes). Moreover, the protests affected the distribution of votes: there is a negative correlation between incumbents vote share and the incidence of protests. With respect to the effects on politicians, I focus my analysis in the Chamber of Deputies of Brazil to I analyze whether the protests had any effects in the legislators behavior. Using a difference-in-difference approach, I show that the protests did not affect all relevant dimensions of the legislators performance, such as presence in plenary sessions, allocation of federal budget amendments and proposal of bills. However, I find evidence of heterogeneous effects regarding reelection incentives and relative position in the coalition.