QUANTITATIVE DATA

Chapters 3 and 6 rely on original quantitative data. This section describes the research procedures that led to the collection of data on organizations, their forms of action, network ties, and attributes discussed in Chapter 3. It also describes the protest event analysis and coding of state speeches presented in Chapter 6.

Event Data

To gather systematic data on collective action on climate change, I conducted a large-scale protest event analysis. Newspaper reports are frequently used in the tradition of protest event analysis to gather systematic information about the volume, timing, and characteristics of contentious collective action (Koopmans and Rucht 2002). I followed this approach by conducting an electronic search across a variety of media outlets to identify relevant events.

For this portion of my study, I decided to limit myself to an analysis of transnational collective action in the European Union (see Chapter 3). Therefore, I searched using two separate sets of terms: (1) (EU or EC or Europe*) AND (climate change or global warming) and (2) (climate change or global warming) AND (protest* or strike* or demonstration*), for the dates January 1, 2008 to December 31, 2009. The second search was added to capture transnational collective action on climate change within the European Union that does not target the EU. From the returned items, I selected those that involved any sort of collective action. In both searches, articles had to be sorted by hand according to two criteria: (1) the action had to be a transnational collective action on climate change that took place in the European Union, and (2) it had to involve a civil society organization. An action qualified as a transnational collective action if it targeted an international institution or if it involved mobilization in more than one country.

I use the term “civil society” loosely to denote a “self-organized citizenry” that includes social movements, trade unions, and nongovernmental organizations but excludes state or corporate actors (Edwards, Foley, and Diani 2001; Emirbayer and Sheller 1999). For the purposes of my analysis, this includes organizations that make “public interest claims” and “pursue social change” (Andrews and Edwards 2004, 486).