About

Neal Caren is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on contemporary U.S. social movements and the use of media data to understand movement processes. He has authored the book Rough Draft of History: A Century of U.S. Social Movements in the News (Princeton 2022) with Edwin Amenta, and his work has been published in journals including American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Problems, and the Annual Review of Sociology. Additionally, he is editing a collection of W.E.B. Du Bois’s writings published in The Crisis. Neal Caren is the editor of Mobilization, a leading interdisciplinary journal specializing in social movements, protests, and other forms of contentious politics. At Carolina, he serves as the Director of the First Year Seminars and Launch program, and teaches courses such as Introduction to Sociology and Social and Economic Justice. At the graduate level, he teaches computational social science, with a focus on collecting and analyzing text data using Python. Outside of his academic pursuits, he enjoys trails in Carolina North Forest and participates as a midpack finisher in trail races.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Computer Science
• Data science
• Demography
• Psychology
• Law
• Criminology
• Media studies
• Political economy
• Demographic economics
• Public relations
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Perceiving Protest: How Publics View the Disruptiveness and Effectiveness of Protest

  Sociological Quarterly · 2026-01-23 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Perceiving Protest: How Publics View the Disruptiveness and Effectiveness of Protest

  SocArXiv (OSF Preprints) · 2025-12-30

  preprintOpen access

  How do people evaluate social movement protest tactics? Theories covering public perceptions of protest emphasize that activists face a tactical dilemma, employing disruptive tactics to advance goals without alienating public support. Existing quantitative evidence on the perceived relationship between tactical disruptiveness and effectiveness, as well as how tactics are influenced by objective properties or subjective perceptions across social groups, remains limited. We address this gap through survey experiment data measuring U.S. voters’ paired-choice preferences across 66 tactics. Using Bradley-Terry models, we show that perceptions of disruptiveness and effectiveness are nonlinearly related, and their misalignment varies across different tactical dimensions. Additionally, results show that perceivers' sociodemographic characteristics moderate the effects of tactical dimensions on protest perceptions. We find that social characteristics pattern views of effectiveness but not disruptiveness. Our research highlights the need to understand how perceptions of effective and disruptive protest are analytically distinct, shaped by tactical dimensions and the diverse publics perceiving them, and holds implications for how tactics may be perceived as legitimate.

  Publisher

• Black lives matter protests and the 2020 Presidential election

  UNC Libraries · 2025-02-22

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Can protest influence elections? We examine whether Black Lives Matters (BLM) protest during the summer of 2020 shaped the November presidential election. We hypothesize that BLM demonstrations are associated with increased voting for the Democratic candidate. We examine a secondary hypothesis that more contentious events (with arrests, injury, or violence) are likely to produce a negative impact. We use data collected from news media, official election returns, and survey data combined with demographic and political control measures to test our hypotheses. We find strong evidence that BLM protests were associated an increased likelihood of voting for the Democratic candidate, with this effect concentrated among the less contentious protest events. Our findings bolster and extend the emerging theoretical claims and evidence that protest plays a substantial role in shaping electoral behavior.

  PublisherDOI

• Comparing Perceived Disruptiveness and Effectiveness of Protest Tactics

  UNC Libraries · 2025-04-05

  articleOpen access

  How do U.S. voters view the disruptiveness and effectiveness of social movement tactics? Strategically-used assertive tactics can enable movement success, though tactics considered too disruptive or violent may reduce public support. The authors investigate how U.S. voters perceive the disruptiveness and effectiveness of various protest tactics. In a representative survey experiment, 497 U.S. voters ranked the disruptiveness and effectiveness of 65 tactics. The authors find that tactics’ perceived disruptiveness and effectiveness exhibit an inverse relationship and a continuous character. The findings suggest that multiple, contextual factors influence public perceptions of protests.

  PublisherDOI

• Perceiving Protest: How Publics View the Disruptiveness and Effectiveness of Protest

  2025-12-30

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  How do people evaluate social movement protest tactics? Theories covering public perceptions of protest emphasize that activists face a tactical dilemma, employing disruptive tactics to advance goals without alienating public support. Existing quantitative evidence on the perceived relationship between tactical disruptiveness and effectiveness, as well as how tactics are influenced by objective properties or subjective perceptions across social groups, remains limited. We address this gap through survey experiment data measuring U.S. voters’ paired-choice preferences across 66 tactics. Using Bradley-Terry models, we show that perceptions of disruptiveness and effectiveness are nonlinearly related, and their misalignment varies across different tactical dimensions. Additionally, results show that perceivers' sociodemographic characteristics moderate the effects of tactical dimensions on protest perceptions. We find that social characteristics pattern views of effectiveness but not disruptiveness. Our research highlights the need to understand how perceptions of effective and disruptive protest are analytically distinct, shaped by tactical dimensions and the diverse publics perceiving them, and holds implications for how tactics may be perceived as legitimate.

  PublisherDOI

• What Drives the News Coverage of US Social Movements?

  UNC Libraries · 2025-04-01

  articleOpen access

  What drives the news coverage of social movements in the professional news media? We address this question by elaborating an institutional mediation model arguing that the news values, routines, and characteristics of the news media induce them to pay attention to movements depending on their characteristics and the political contexts in which they engage. The news-making characteristics of movements include their disruptive capacities and organizational strength, and the political contexts include a partisan regime in power, benefitting from national policies, and congressional investigations. To appraise these arguments, we analyze approximately 1 million news articles mentioning 29 social movements over the twentieth century, published in four national newspapers. We use negative binomial regression analyses and separate time-series analyses of the labor movement to assess the model’s robustness across different movements, time periods, and news sources. In each analysis, the results support the hypotheses based on the institutional mediation model. More generally, we argue that the influence of social movements on institutions depends on the structure and operating procedures of those institutions. This insight has implications for future studies of the influence of movements on major social institutions.

  PublisherDOI

• Recipes for Attention: Policy Reforms, Crises, Organizational Characteristics, and the Newspaper Coverage of the LGBT Movement, 1969–2009

  UNC Libraries · 2025-09-18

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Why do some organizations in a movement seeking social change gain extensive national newspaper coverage? To address the question, we innovate in theoretical and empirical ways. First, we elaborate a theoretical argument that builds from the political mediation theory of movement consequences and incorporates the social organization of newspaper practices. This media and political mediation model integrates political and media contexts and organizations' characteristics and actions. With this model, we hypothesize two main routes to coverage: one that includes changes in public policy and involves policy‐engaged, well‐resourced, and inclusive organizations and a second that combines social crises and protest organizations. Second, we appraise these arguments with the first analysis of the national coverage of all organizations in a social movement over its career: 84 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights and AIDS‐related organizations in the New York Times , Los Angeles Times , and Wall Street Journal from 1969 to 2010. These analyses go beyond previous research that provides either snapshots of many organizations at one point in time or overtime analyses of aggregated groups of organizations or individual organizations. The results of both historical and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analyses support our media and political mediation model.

  PublisherDOI

• Put Me in, Coach? Referee? Owner? Security?

  2025-09-26

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Economic Breakdown and Collective Action

  UNC Libraries · 2024-07-19

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  While social movement scholarship has emphasized the role of activists in socially constructing grievances, we contend that material adversity is a reoccurring precondition of anti-state mobilization. We test the effect of economic decline on the count of large-scale, anti-government demonstrations and riots. Using multiple sources of newspaper reports of contentious events across 145 countries during the period 1960-2006, we find a statistically significant negative relationship between economic growth and the number of contentious events, controlling for a variety of state-governance, demographic, and media characteristics. We find that the effect is strongest under conditions of extreme economic decline and in non-democracies. These findings highlight the need for social movement scholars to take seriously the role of economic performance as an important factor that enables mobilization.

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond the protest paradigm: Four types of news coverage and America's most prominent social movement organizations

  Sociological Forum · 2024-05-28 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract What determines the quality of coverage received by social movement organizations when they appear extensively in the news? Research on the news coverage of social movement organizations is dominated by case studies supporting the “protest paradigm,” which argues that journalists portray movement activists trivially and negatively when covering protest. However, movement organizations often make long‐running news for many different reasons, mainly not protest. We argue that some of this extensive news will lead to worse coverage—in terms of substance and sentiment—notably when the main action covered involves violence. Extensive coverage centered on other actions, however, notably politically assertive action, will tend to produce “good news” in these dimensions. We analyze the news of the twentieth century's 100 most‐covered U.S. movement organizations in their biggest news year in four national newspapers. Topic models indicate that these organizations were mainly covered for actions other than nonviolent protest, including politically assertive action, strikes, civic action, investigations, trials, and violence. Natural language processing analyses and hand‐coding show that their news also varied widely in sentiment and substance. Employing qualitative comparative analyses, we find that the main action behind news strongly influences its quality, and there may be several news paradigms for movement organizations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Edwin Amenta

  University of California, Irvine

  30 shared

• Andrew J. Perrin

  8 shared

• Sarah Gaby

  University of North Carolina Wilmington

  8 shared

• Kenneth T. Andrews

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  5 shared

• Philip N. Cohen

  University of Maryland, College Park

  4 shared

• Sheera Joy Olasky

  4 shared

• Weijun Yuan

  University of California, Irvine

  4 shared

• Eliana M. Perrin

  Johns Hopkins University

  3 shared