Policing and Repression | Jennifer Earl

Professor Earl has been studying repression and protest policing since the beginning of her career. This page captures overall research themes (instead of specific projects), archived material from funded projects, and new directions in research. That said, her c.v. is a more comprehensive resource for publications on this topic.

Theorizing Repression and Generative Reviews of Research

Professor Earl has been focused on better conceptualizing and theorizing of repression across her career. Select publications include:

Earl, Jennifer. 2003. “Tanks, Tear Gas and Taxes: Toward a Theory of Movement Repression.” Sociological Theory 21(1): 44-68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3108608.

Earl, Jennifer. 2004. “Controlling Protest: New Directions for Research on the Social Control of Protest.” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, Special Issue on Authority in Contention 25: 55-83.

Earl, Jennifer. 2006. “Introduction: Repression and the Social Control of Protest” Mobilization 11(2): 129-143. http://www.metapress.com/content/B55GM84032815278

Earl, Jennifer. 2010. “A Lawyers Guide to the Repression Literature.” National Lawyers Guild Review 67(1): 3-36.

Earl, Jennifer. 2011. “Political Repression: Iron Fists, Velvet Gloves, and Diffuse Control” Annual Review of Sociology 37: 261–284. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41288608.

Earl, Jennifer, Rina James, Elliot Ramo, and Sam Scovill. 2021. “Protest, Activism, and False Information.” Pp. 290-301 in Routledge Companion to Media Misinformation & Populism, edited by Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord. New York: Routledge.

Earl, Jennifer and Jessica Maves Braithwaite. 2022. “Layers of Political Repression: Connecting Disjointed Research Related to Social Movement Repression.” The Annual Review of Law and Social Sciences 18: 227-248. Available online at: http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/CPCY5RVKVVA8NZYIKXSG/full/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-050520-092713.

Earl, Jennifer, Thomas V. Maher, Jennifer Pan. 2022. “The Digital Repression of Social Movements, Protest, and Activism: A Synthetic Review.” Science Advances 8(10): abl8198. Available online at: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abl8198.

Protest Policing, Situational Threats, and a Blue Approach

Professor Earl began work on this specific topic in her dissertation. Her dissertation focused on producing a state-of-the-art synthesis and comparison of major quantitative approaches to explaining protest policing while also introducing a “Blue Model” of protest policing that focused on situational threats from the perspective of police and also institutional forces from within policing. More recently, Professor Earl and collaborators have used state-of-the-art quantitative models to understand how situational threats vary over time and the extent to which policing-side influences actually dominate (or fail to dominate) the influences that explain over time changes in police presence and behavior at protest events.

Selected publications include:

Earl, Jennifer, Sarah A. Soule and John D. McCarthy. 2003 “Protest under Fire? Explaining the Policing of Protest.” American Sociological Review 68(4): 581-606.http://www.jstor.org/stable/1519740.

Earl, Jennifer and Sarah A. Soule. 2006. “Seeing Blue: A Police-Centered Explanation of Protest Policing” Mobilization 11(2): 145-164. (Lead article) http://www.metapress.com/content/ U1WJ8W41N301627U.

Reynolds-Stenson, Heidi and Jennifer Earl. 2022. “The Puzzle of Protest Policing over Time: Historicizing Repression Research Using Temporal Moving Regressions.” American Behavioral Scientist 6(5) 625–647. Available online at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00027642211021642

Elliott, Thomas, Jennifer Earl, Thomas V. Maher, and Heidi Reynolds-Stenson. 2022. “Softer Policing or the Institutionalization of Protest? Decomposing Changes in Observed Protest Policing Over Time.” American Journal of Sociology 127(4): 1311–1365. Available online at: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/719001

Explaining Changes in Best Practice Protest Policing Models

Police don’t always do what they plan to do at protest events, but what they plan to do is still very important. In a series of projects, Professor Earl has tried to understand the forces that have shaped the development of and change of best practice protest policing models in the US from 1960-1980. Starting with her dissertation, continuing through an NSF-funded project highlighted here, and in a in-progress monograph with Heidi Reynolds-Stenson drawing on that project, Professor Earl’s research challenges otherwise settled understandings of how and why model protest policing protocols have changed in the US.

In the “Police Professionalism and Changing Protest Policing Protocols Project,” funded by a NSF award (read the project description here: NSF website), Professor Earl’s team aimed to develop a new perspective to explain rapid changes in the policing of protest from the 1960s to 1980s in the United States. The team included several graduate students and many undergrads, some of whom are pictured here:

Per the data management plan, click here to register to receive a link to the quantitative datasets and codebooks for the four police trade journals coded by this project: bit.ly/305nngY.

Stay tuned for the monograph from this project…

Arrests as a Form of Social Movement Repression

Professor Earl has been very concerned about the role of arrests in suppressing free speech and assembly in social movements. She is currently working on a book project bringing these themes together. Stay tuned for more on this topic.

Selected publications:

Earl, Jennifer. 2005 “You Can Beat the Rap, But You Can’t Beat the Ride: Bringing Arrests Back into Research on Repression.” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change 26:101-139.

Earl, Jennifer. 2011. “Protest Arrests and Future Protest Participation: The 2004 Republican National Convention Arrestees and the Effects of Repression.” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 45: 141-173.

Earl, Jennifer. 2009 “Information Access and Protest Policing Post-9/11: Studying the Policing of the 2004 Republican National Convention” American Behavioral Scientist 53(1): 44-60. http://abs.sagepub.com/content/53/1/44

Digital Repression

As digital and social media became pervasive, so too did the use of digital tools to repress protest and/or the targeting for individuals and groups for repression based on their online activity. Professor Earl has been working on this topic and is currently developing a new empirical project with Tom Maher on the topic, so stay tuned.

Selected publications:

Earl, Jennifer and Alan Schussman. 2004. “Cease and Desist: Repression, Strategic Voting and the 2000 Presidential Election.” Mobilization 9(2): 188-202. http://www.metapress.com/content/J1UQ072540827Q77

Beyer, Jessica L. and Jennifer Earl, 2018. “Backfire Online: Studying Reactions to the Repression of Internet Activism.” Pp. 102-142 in The Paradox of Repression and Nonviolent Movements, edited by Lester R. Kurtz and Lee A. Smithey. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. (In Syracuse Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution series.)

The Effects of Repression (including backfire)

People often assume that repression “works” by deterring protest, but the result of repression is one of the most empirically contested and uncertain relationships in the study of repression. Professor Earl has considered these effects across time in a series of papers.

Selected publications:

Earl, Jennifer and Sarah A. Soule. 2010. “The Impacts of Repression: The Effect of Police Presence and Action on Subsequent Protest Rates” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, 30: 75-113.

Earl, Jennifer and Jessica L. Beyer. 2014. “The Dynamics of Backlash Online: Anonymous and the Battle for WikiLeaks.” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change 37: 207-233.