Measuring Social Unrest Using Media Reports

By Philip Barrett, Maximiliano Appendino, Kate Nguyen, Jorge de Leon Miranda

July 17, 2020

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Format: Chicago

Philip Barrett, Maximiliano Appendino, Kate Nguyen, and Jorge de Leon Miranda. Measuring Social Unrest Using Media Reports, (USA: International Monetary Fund, 2020) accessed September 19, 2024

Disclaimer: IMF Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to encourage debate. The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF, its Executive Board, or IMF management.

Summary

We present a new index of social unrest based on counts of relevant media reports. The index consists of individual monthly time series for 130 countries, available with almost no lag, and can be easily and transparently replicated. Spikes in the index identify major events, which correspond very closely to event timelines from external sources for four major regional waves of social unrest. We show that the cross-sectional distribution of the index can be simply and precisely characterized, and that social unrest is associated with a 3 percentage point increase in the frequency of social unrest domestically and a 1 percent increase in neighbors in the next six months. Despite this, social unrest is not a better predictor of future social unrest than the country average rate.

Subject: Expenditure, Labor, Public expenditure review

Keywords: Appendix E, Arabic language, Country-horizon pair, Media, Middle East, North Africa, Political science, Protest, Public expenditure review, RSUI data, RSUI event coding, RSUI index, Social Unrest, South America, Statistical analysis, Sub-Saharan Africa, Terms OR, Unrest events, WP

Publication Details

Pages:

87
Volume:

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DOI:

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Issue:

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Series:

Working Paper No. 2020/129
Stock No:

WPIEA2020129
ISBN:

9781513550275
ISSN:

1018-5941

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