Students And Protests : A Quantitative Analysis

Previous studies have found a positive relationship between the youth and the educated with protest intensity, but the form that these protests take needs further research. We argue that students are a unique group, acting neither as an educated nor a young population, and three possible mechanisms push students towards non-violent rather than violent forms of protest. By promoting values of tolerance, higher levels of human capital, and social mobility, education serves as a factor that pacifies destructive tendencies in protest movements. At the same time, universities are a platform for cooperation, and the large amounts of free time and energy make the costs of participating in protests for students minimal compared to other groups. Using a negative binomial regression and a rare events logistic regression, we find that the proportion of students is a strong and consistently significant predictor of the number of non-violent demonstrations