The science of contemporary street protest: New efforts in the United States.

Since the inauguration of Donald Trump, there has been substantial and ongoing protest against the Administration. Street demonstrations are some of the most visible forms of opposition to the Administration and its policies. This article reviews the two most central methods for studying street protest on a large scale: building comprehensive event databases and conducting field surveys of participants at demonstrations. After discussing the broader development of these methods, this article provides a detailed assessment of recent and ongoing projects studying the current wave of contention. Recommendations are offered to meet major challenges, including making data publicly available in near real time, increasing the validity and reliability of event data, expanding the scope of crowd surveys, and integrating ongoing projects in a meaningful way by building new research infrastructure.

Hybrid activism: social movement mobilization in a multimovement environment.

Social movement organizations often struggle to mobilize supporters from allied movements in their efforts to achieve critical mass. The authors argue that organizations with hybrid identities--those whose organizational identities span the boundaries of two or more social movements, issues, or identities--are vital to mobilizing these constituencies. They use original data from their study of the post-9/11 U.S. antiwar movement to show that individuals with past involvement in nonantiwar movements are more likely to join hybrid organizations than are individuals without involvement in nonantiwar movements. In addition, they show that organizations with hybrid identities occupy relatively more central positions in interorganizational cocontact networks within the antiwar movement and thus recruit significantly more participants in demonstrations than do nonhybrid organizations. Contrary to earlier research, they do not find that hybrid organizations are subject to an illegitimacy discount; instead, they find that hybridization can augment the ability of social movement organizations to mobilize their supporters in multimovement environments.

Brokering health policy: coalitions, parties, and interest group influence.

Assuming a position as broker between disconnected interests is one way for an interest group to influence the making of federal health policy. This study demonstrates how groups use their connections with political parties and lobbying coalitions to augment their brokerage positions and enhance their influence over policy making. Evidence is drawn from statistical analysis of 263 interviews with health policy elites and a qualitative case study of the debate over the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003. The results explain, in part, how interest groups play their brokerage roles as dispersed actors in a decentralized system, rather than as central mediators that intervene in a wide range of policy disputes.