The following article by Erica Chenoweth and Jeremy Pressman was posted on the Washington Post website January 25, 2018:
This is the 12th installment in a monthly series reporting on political crowds in the United States. Each month, the Crowd Counting Consortium will post updates about trends and patterns from the previous month as recorded by our volunteers. Find all the previous posts in the series here. For our counting methods, please see our first post in the series.
For December 2017, we tallied 796 protests, demonstrations, strikes, marches, sit-ins and rallies in the United States, with at least one in every state and the District of Columbia. Our conservative guess is that between 58,986 and 81,091 people showed up at these political gatherings, although it is likely there were far more. Because mainstream media often neglect to report nonviolent actions — especially small ones — it is probable that we did not record every event that took place. For 28 percent of the events we listed this month, we lacked an estimate of crowd size.
Nevertheless, we think our tally gives us a useful pool of information to better understand political mobilization in the United States — particularly how reports of crowds change from month to month. The number of protests remains fairly stable month to month, and December 2017 is no exception, although the crowds at 2017’s end were somewhat smaller than they were earlier in 2017. Continue reading “In December, thousands of Americans protested against the tax plan, for DACA and about all the other usual suspects”
