The Causes of Racial Disturbances: A Comparison of Alternative Explanations

Spilerman, Seymour

doi:10.2307/2093941

Cited by 230 publications

(147 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Formally, contagious influence is part of a collective behavior process when one collective actor engages in an act of protest or violence and their behavior changes the probability of future similar acts (Oberschall 1980(Oberschall , 1989Spilerman 1970;Pitcher, Hamblin, and Miller 1978;Myers 1997b;Shanahan and Olzak 1998;Aguirre, Quarantelli, and Mendoza 1988). How and why would this occur with riots in general and the racial riots of the 1960s in particular?…”

Section: Riot Contagionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When examining how a riot contributes to a long-term trend of collective violence, the most obvious engine driving a diffusion process is that some kind of positive reinforcement results from rioting (Spilerman 1970;Sears and Tomlinson 1968). Whether the gains are real, promised, or illusory, if potential rioters believe that prior violence led to gains by the rioters and other blacks, then they have increased impetus to riot themselves (Oliver 1989).…”

Section: Long-term Contributions To Riot Wavesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Among the perspectives that focus on short-term effects, several analysts have entertained the notion of reinforcement effects, under which a riot in a particular city would increase the chances of another riot in the same city (Spilerman 1970; National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders 1968). Hypotheses about reinforcement grew from observations that a riot tended to temporarily increase polarization between racial groups.…”

Section: Short-term Contagion Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Unfortunately, predicting riots turned out to be a notoriously difficult task, and even retrospective analyses have had difficulty explaining rioting using the social and economic conditions presumed to be at issue (Spilerman 1970(Spilerman , 1971(Spilerman , 1976Carter 1983Carter , 1986Jiobu 1971;Lieske 1978;see McPhail [1994] for an overview). After examining a multitude of city-level structural and economic variables, Spilerman (1970Spilerman ( , 1976 concluded that the only useful predictors of rioting were the black population of a city and whether the city was located in the South. Spilerman recognized that ghetto conditions were poor everywhere and that blacks had generally accepted rioting to be a reasonable protest mechanism.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In particular, there were marked clusters of riots related to the two most intense outbreaks-Detroit, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey-which provided the provocative hypothesis of riot contagion. Some analyses of the riots that followed, particularly Spilerman's (1970), attempted to test this hypothesis but failed to find any significant effects. Unfortunately, the analytic techniques used to examine the hypothesis were ill-suited to providing convincing evidence one way or another, and the issue was effectively abandoned.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

The Diffusion of Collective Violence: Infectiousness, Susceptibility, and Mass Media Networks

Myers

2000

American Journal of Sociology

278

158

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Section: Riot Contagionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Long-term Contributions To Riot Wavesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Short-term Contagion Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

The Diffusion of Collective Violence: Infectiousness, Susceptibility, and Mass Media Networks

Myers

2000

American Journal of Sociology

278

158

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Homicides and race riots

Britt

Allen

1988

J. Community Psychol.

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Comparative analysis of American race riots and homicides during the 1960s shows that the presence of large percentages of non‐Whites and people living in structural poverty increased the chances of cities' having both collective (race riots) and individual (homicides) violence. Cities in the South had a greater chance of having relatively serious homicide activity than did other U.S. cities but a lesser chance of having serious race riot activity. The relative risk of individual (homicide) versus less individualistic (race riot) response to structural poverty is interpreted from a multidimensional perspective that treats both riots and homicide as examples of violent coping mechanisms. These mechanisms form one axis of a three‐dimensional representation of community coping mechanisms: violent/non‐violent, symptom focused/cause focused, and collective/individual. Several authors (e.g., Ball‐Rokeach & Short, 1986; Spilerman, 1976) have argued that the differential incidence of riots in the South and in the rest of the country during the sixties should be interpreted in terms of the relative repressiveness and unresponsiveness of city governments in the South. Our findings suggest that repressiveness and unresponsiveness may be conducive to the development of coping mechanisms in communities that define and resolve problems at the individual level. The ironic consequences of such cultural adaptation are discussed.

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Riots

Myers¹

2013

The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements

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A riot is an unruly collective act of violence that is temporary, discontinuous from everyday routines, and results in damage to persons or property of either the participants or targets of the collective actor. Although most social scientists have an intuitive sense of what constitutes a riot, the edges of the definition are fuzzy and it can be difficult to determine whether or not some events are actually “riots.” For example, it is agreed that a riot is a collective act. That is, more than one individual must be involved and at least minimally coordinate action in order for a riot to occur. Two people acting together, however, would not constitute a riot, even though it is a collective act of violence. Thus, the lower limit for participation, damage, and duration to define a riot is difficult to establish and has led many sociologists to analyze events more ambiguously referred to as “civil disorders” or “collective violence.” For most, however, unless there are at least 30–50 people involved, the events last more than a few moments, and there is action that could result in property damage or injury requiring medical attention, a riot has not occurred.

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The Causes of Racial Disturbances: A Comparison of Alternative Explanations

Cited by 230 publications

References 4 publications

The Diffusion of Collective Violence: Infectiousness, Susceptibility, and Mass Media Networks

The Diffusion of Collective Violence: Infectiousness, Susceptibility, and Mass Media Networks

Homicides and race riots

Riots

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