ASSESSING STABILITY IN THE PATTERNS OF SELECTION BIAS IN NEWSPAPER COVERAGE OF PROTEST DURING THE TRANSITION FROM COMMUNISM IN BELARUS

†Analyses of selection bias in the coverage of protest events in Minsk, Belarus between 1990 and 1995 are presented. The rapid changes characterizing Minsk during its transition from Communism made it an ideal location for investigating the stability of the patterns of selection bias. Police records of 817 protest events were used to create a protest event dataset, and Minsk’s four daily newspapers were read for the entire period in order to establish estimates of event coverage. Results show that large events, events with strong sponsors and, in two of the four newspapers, events accompanied by arrests are each more likely to receive coverage. These effects remain stable through phases of the transition for the combined coverage in any of the papers. The selection factors of event size and event sponsorship also display stability across media source, although the impact of arrests is not always consequential. Protest demonstrations have become a common and legitimate mechanism of normal politics in Western democracies and, more and more so in Eastern European nations and the former Soviet Republics. Media reports of protests have, at the same time, increasingly served as the source of data for social scientific analysis of protest. The accumulating body of protest event research relies mostly on newspaper reports that are inevitably subject to the common problems of selection bias: newspapers report only a subset of protest events and that subset is not likely to be a representative sample of all protests that occurred. The ability of researchers to take problems of selection bias into account successfully in their interpretations of patterns they find in their data depends on (1) knowing what factors are consistently most important in producing the patterns of selection bias; and (2) being able to assume that the patterns of selection bias are relatively stable over time and across media sources. The research reported here is unique because it allows an assessment of the stability of the structure of three of the most important factors affecting selection bias in newspaper coverage of protest—size or intensity of an event, its extraordinariness (especially conflict with authorities) and the social and political status of event sponsors—through a very turbulent transition from communism in Minsk, Belarus. Over the past half-century protest demonstrations have become a central part of the process of political representation in Western democracies (Tilly 1983; Tarrow 1988, 1989, and 1993; Barnes and Kasse 1979; McCarthy and McPhail 1998). The demonstration became an entrenched part of the tactical repertoire of citizens’ movements with the rise of the European labor movement (Tilly 1984), and it has become ever more common and widely legitimate since the middle of the twentieth century (Dalton 1996). Since the fall of the Soviet regime as well, public protests have become more common and more legitimate in Eastern