Reproduction Archive for Paper: 'The Dissent Score: Using Events Data to Measure Dissent'

Researchers commonly use measures of dissent or protest in their analyses. Yet a standardized, public, ready-to-use measure does not exist. In this paper, we introduce such a measure---what we call the \"dissent score.\" To create the dissent score, we follow the standard practice in the literature and use the number of dissent events reported in events data sets. However, we make two improvements. First, we adjust for variation in media scrutiny by using the *rate* of dissent events---the number of dissent events compared to the total number of events reported in the data set. Second, we use a hierarchical model to partially pool these rates within and across countries to reduce measurement error in places with few events. We supply the country-year dissent score in an easy-to-use format, but also describe our method and supply the computer code so that researchers can extend our method, make adjustments, compute the dissent score for alternative place-times, or apply the idea to new concepts.