The Global Sociology Blog

Yup, that’s what happened to Fabio Rojas’s (of OrgTheory fame) colleague Michael Heaney while doing research in the field on the mobilization of street demonstrators.

Inside HigherEd describes the research as such

“As the Republican Party was gathering this week to complete its official business and prepare for its first major public-facing presentations, a group of researchers, it turns out, was preparing some work of its own: what they billed as the first comprehensive comparative study of the two major party conventions. Hippen, along with about 40 other students at “the U,” as it’s affectionately called here, are working for a group of scholars who hope the study will shed light on the internal dynamics of both protest movements and party delegates.

While there’s no way to take a perfectly random sample of a large crowd of people, the researchers are relying on the “anchor” method, in which a person who stands out acts as a visual starting point. The researcher then counts five people away from that person in an effort to avoid a bias toward people who automatically capture attention.

“This is a totally unique study in the sense that nobody has ever done this kind of comparison between the two conventions before,” said Michael T. Heaney, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Florida. “This study is both an innovative study in the study of political parties and it’s an innovative study in the study of social movements, and it also makes an effort to compare the two.”

Heaney and his colleague, Fabio Rojas, an assistant professor of sociology at Indiana University in Bloomington, have already made a name for themselves in the burgeoning field of studying what they call “the party in the street.” (Inside Higher Ed profiled their earlier work on the antiwar movement last year.) As Heaney discovered on Monday — when some of the protesters turned to vandalism and scuffled with police, resulting in almost 300 arrests — keeping a scholarly ear to the street can pose occupational hazards.

“Unfortunately I was there for that. I was actually pepper-gassed,” he said matter of factly. “I was nowhere near any police … or anything like that, and this big gust of wind came along and just hit me in the face with pepper spray. They were using these large gas canisters to dispense the pepper spray, and apparently they were just dispensing large amounts of it….”

It was, he added, a “pretty hard batch.”

The study itself consists of surveys handed out to both protesters and delegates in Denver and St. Paul. The multi-part project will look, in part, at how parties and protesters interact with each other, and the similarities and differences between such activists and party delegates.”

I’m especially interested in the results of this aspect of the research:

“In studying those groups, the scholars are building a theory of how movements interact with party structures. They hypothesize, for example, that social networks, institutional history and a party’s culture all contribute to easing or exacerbating tensions between various factions. Are delegates with a more heterogeneous group of associates more likely to let rifts heal, as in the Democratic Party this year? What about those with a longer history in the party? Do those who view the party as “tolerant of diversity” let bygones be bygones?”