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 ID | City | Date | Number of participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| 567874 | Caracas | 30/06/2010 | 500 |
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 ID | City | Date | Number of participants | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4556 | Caracas | 30/06/2010 | 500 | AP |
| 4557 | Caracas | 30/06/2010 | 100 | AFP |
| 4558 | Caracas | 30/06/2010 | 150 | BBC Monitoring |
Report-level data allow users to examine variation among the different reports, for example the different numbers of participants.