Studying collective action with newspaper accounts of protest events, rare only 20 years ago, has become commonplace in the past decade. A critical literature has accompanied the growth of protest event analysis. The literature has focused on selection bias-particularly which subset of events are covered-and description bias-notably, the veracity of the coverage. The "hard news" of the event, if it is reported, tends to be relatively accurate. However, a newspaper's decision to cover an event at all is influenced by the type of event, the news agency, and the issue involved. In this review, we discuss approaches to detecting bias, as well as ways to factor knowledge about bias into interpretations of protest event data.

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Despite the importance of research on repression to the study of social movements, few researchers have focused on developing a refined and powerful conceptualization of repression. To address the difficulties such theoretical inattention produces, three key dimensions of repression are outlined and crossed to produce a repression typology. The merit of this typology for researchers is shown by using the typology to: (1) reorganize major research findings on repression; (2) diagnose theoretical and empirical oversights and missteps in the study of repression; and (3) develop new hypotheses about explanatory factors related to repression and relationships between different forms of repression. Such a typology represents an important step toward creating richer theoretical explanations of repression.

This article reviews research on political repression by social movement scholars. Four topics are discussed: (a) debates over the conceptualization of repression, the breadth of the concept, whether distinctions within the concept are productive and/or forms of repression are directly comparable, and the relationship between repression and political opportunities; (b) recent research on different types of repression, particularly protest policing; (c) an evaluation of research on different explanations of repression; and (d ) an evaluation of research on the consequences of repression. Attention is also paid to areas where future research effort might be most productively spent, including identifying substantial gaps where more research is needed, where important debates exist that need research to push toward their resolution, where robust results exist but could be furthered by refinements, and where a more inclusive conceptualization of repression may link the study of repression to other significant literatures. 261

An investigation into how specific Web technologies can change the dynamics of organizing and participating in political and social protest. Much attention has been paid in recent years to the emergence of “Internet activism,” but scholars and pundits disagree about whether online political activity is different in kind from more traditional forms of activism. Does the global reach and blazing speed of the Internet affect the essential character or dynamics of online political protest? In Digitally Enabled Social Change, Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport examine key characteristics of web activism and investigate their impacts on organizing and participation. Earl and Kimport argue that the web offers two key affordances relevant to activism: sharply reduced costs for creating, organizing, and participating in protest; and the decreased need for activists to be physically together in order to act together. Drawing on evidence from samples of online petitions, boycotts, and letter-writing and e-mailing campaigns, Earl and Kimport show that the more these affordances are leveraged, the more transformative the changes to organizing and participating in protest.