Event Catalogs as Theories

Abstract

All empirical social research rests, at least implicitly, on not one but two theories: a theory explaining the phenomenon under study, another theory explaining the generation of evidence concerning the phenomenon. The two theories necessarily interact, setting important constraints on each other. The second theory answers questions about how the phenomenon leaves traces, how analysts can observe those traces, and how analysts can reconstruct attributes, elements, causes, and effects of the phenomenon from those traces. As employed in studies of contentious politics, event catalogs raise all these questions. Competing conceptions of the phenomenon under study as protest, as collective violence, as collective action, as conflict, and as contentious claimmaking imply different measurement strategies. The strategy of aggregation follows plausibly from identification of the phenomenon as protest or violence, the strategy of incidence from most of the competing conceptions, the strategy of internal regularities only from treatments of the crucial phenomenon as collective action, conflict, or contentious claim-making.

Opportunity without Organization: Labour Mobilization in Egypt after the 25th January Revolution

“…The foundational data source used for this paper is an event catalogue (Tilly 2002) [ Figure 5 about here]…”

Civil Society, Institutional Change, and the Politics of Reform: The Great Transition

“…Our analysis is based on the long tradition in history, political sociology and in the study of social movements of using event catalogues to trace the evolution of diverse forms of collective/contentious action and their effects (for an excellent overview, see Tilly 2002). Such event catalogues and datasets on multiple social and/or political interactions are used, in the first place, to describe more formally the characteristics of general phenomena such as the evolution of civil society or patterns of state-society interactions.…”

“…In addition to descriptions, event catalogues are also used to account for the causes and longer-term effects of the phenomena traced in this manner (see, among others, Tilly 2002. ) Although an extensive literature already exists on protest event analysis in the more established democracies (see, among others, Tarrow 1989;Tilly 2002;McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001;Rucht and Koopmans 1999;della Porta, Kriesi and Rucht 1999), there is only a handful of studies on the forms and effects of contentious civic action in the pre-or post-transition countries of Eastern and Central Europe. The most encompassing studies that deal with this part of the world discuss either a single country or compare some characteristically different cases.…”

¿quiénes Son Y Para Qué? El Proceso De Extranjerización De La Tierra en Argentina a Partir De 2002

“…Para estudiar estas características se construyó una base de datos de tipo "catálogo de eventos" (Olzak 1989, Tilly 2002). La unidad de registro (el "evento") fue la transacción sobre la tierra, siempre que la parte adquiriente fuera extranjera y la parte cedente fuera nacional.…”