About the Database

The Mass Mobilization in Autocracies Database is a report-level database about political protest in autocracies. “Report-level” means that every mention of a political protest in a news article is coded as a separate report about a protest event. The following hypothetical example illustrates what this means. Typically, event databases contain one entry per event (event-level data):

Event IDCityDateNumber of participants
567874Caracas30/06/2010500

Oftentimes, however, we use multiple news reports for coding a single event. The MMAD lists the information about a protest event separately for each report. This is what we call report-level data.

Report IDCityDateNumber of participantsSource
4556Caracas30/06/2010500AP
4557Caracas30/06/2010100AFP
4558Caracas30/06/2010150BBC Monitoring

Report-level data allow users to examine variation among the different reports, for example the different numbers of participants.