Inequality, Climate Change, and Protests around the World, 1996-2020

Regina Werum, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Shawn Ratcliff, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Social movement scholars have long explored the extent to which social inequality and political conditions shape protests, broadly defined. However, most research relies on single-country or comparative case studies. Few projects have explored the extent to which we can extrapolate from e.g., factors affecting protests in industrialized and/or wealthy countries to factors shaping protests worldwide. To that end, we present a unique analysis that blends classic social science approaches with insights from climate science that increasingly show the direct and indirect effects of climate change on issues related to human migration, political instability, and protests. Specifically, we explore how extreme precipitation and temperature patterns in combination with political conditions and social inequalities around gender, ethnic, and socio-economic axes impact protest patterns. To that end, we employ a global sample of countries for the post-Cold War era, conducting a series of cross-sectional time-series analyses on 115 countries between 1996 and 2020 (n=115x25=3,875). For our outcome variable, we draw on media-reported protests captured by the Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS) database. Our explanatory variables are derived from the satellite-based Climate Hazards Infrared Precipitation with Station (CHIRPS) database, the satellite-based Climatic Research Unit (CRU v. 4) time-series on temperatures (both standardized), as well as various socio-political datasets, including the World Bank, V-Dem dataset, and Polity IV. Models also control for quality of life indicators known to affect protests. Findings indicate two major patterns. First, social inequalities overall strongly predict the level of protest countries experience in a given year. However, the relationship between gendered grievances and political opportunities impacts protest patterns differently than those around ethnic and economically based dynamics. Second, despite evidence from other research that climate-related dynamics shape protests at local levels, our national-level analyses suggest that temporal rather than cross-sectional dynamics related to climate volatility strongly affect protest levels.

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 Presented in Session 167. Protests, Movements, Rebellions