The comprehensive and systematic study of collective action organizations (AOs) requires a new methodological approach that takes into account the rise of online sources as well as the new ways in which people interact and participate in politics. This article aims to present and situate in the related literature such an approach, which was recently created and applied in two European Commission funded research projects, LIVEWHAT and TransSOL, across nine and eight countries respectively. Moving beyond recent studies using online sources, our research used a hubs website based approach to study alternative action organizations (AAOs) in the LIVEWHAT project and transnational solidarity AOs in the TransSOL project. The hubs and subhubs websites that aggregate data on AOs in multiple regions were scraped to identify national samples that offer advanced coverage of the repertoire of AO activities, as defined by the teams. These nodal websites were used as sources, similar to the way in which newspapers are treated in protest event analysis. The article situates and compares the new action organization analysis approach against its foundational protest event, protest case, and political claims analyses, as well as other approaches offering data on online activism. It outlines its main features and the related data construction process, while showcasing its application in the two European Commission cross-national projects. Finally, its merits and limitations are discussed, including a reference to how it can be used as a foundation for a mixed methods approach.
This article investigates the involvement of alternative action organizations in three forms of political advocacy in an attempt to gauge their degree of politicization. These forms can be understood as representing three different ways of making political claims: by raising public awareness with respect to a given cause or issue, by trying to influence the policy maker through “insider” lobbying activities, and by protesting in the streets as “outsiders.” Our findings show strong cross-national variations in all three forms of political activities, although not always following a consistent pattern. They also suggest that there is a relationship between the severity of the economic crisis and the form of advocacy. Most important, our analysis suggests that the politicization of alternative action organizations depends both on certain internal characteristics such as their degree of formalization and professionalization, as well as their thematic focus, and the scope of their activities, and on the broader context in terms of economic crisis, austerity policies, and political opportunities. As regards the latter, we find an impact especially on lobbying and protesting.
In this Master Thesis, we have analytically derived and numerically implemented three estimators of the Prediction Divergence Criterion (Avella-Medina et al., working paper) for Model Selection within the logistic regression framework. After the validation of these estimators by means of simulations, we have performed Model Selection both when the order of the variables was known in advance and when the order was correct but decided by an already existing algorithm, namely the binary lasso (Friedman et al., 2010). Finally we have produced evidences of the good performance of two of these estimators, one derived from the L2 norm error measure and the other from the binomial deviance, respectively in highly and moderately correlated settings. They have been proven better, to the extension of the simulation study, than the defaults methods, based on 10-fold Cross Validation, currently available in the glmnet(Friedman et al., 2017) R package.
