Mass Mobilization Protest Data
Mass Mobilization Protest Data
The Mass Mobilization project provides event-level protests against governments as an unrestricted tab-delimited file through Harvard Dataverse, with source CSV and Stata representations plus a PDF codebook. Its 31 fields include country, year and event dates, region, location, participant count or category, protester identity and demands, violence, state responses, sources and notes; no key is needed.
Coverage
The current Dataverse release covers all countries from 1990-01-01 through 2020-03-31 and contains 17,145 rows across 166 country labels. The released tab file is about 15.6 MB, version 5.1 was last updated on 2022-10-10, and no continuing update schedule is stated.
Verdict
A historical event signal for studying protest incidence, demands, participant scale, violence and government response across countries. It is not a live feed and stops on 2020-03-31, so it cannot describe current protest conditions. Event locations are text rather than coordinates, participant measures mix counts and categories, and source reporting and coding choices can create coverage gaps. Preserve event IDs, source text and notes, and validate reconstructed dates because day or month components can be missing.
Get the free weekly email
Free weekly email of newly verified free data. Unsubscribe by emailing us.
By entering your email and clicking Subscribe, you agree to receive the Signal Lab weekly email from Quantum Data Technologies Ltd., 3200-650 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, BC V6B 4P7, Canada (signal-lab@qdt.ai). You can unsubscribe at any time: reply "unsubscribe" to any email or write to signal-lab@qdt.ai. See our Privacy Policy.
Use in your agent
Load Mass Mobilization protests into pandas and Parquet. Checked against the provider's documentation on Nov 1, 2026.
Access
- No account or key. Dataverse file 4291456 is unrestricted and returns the tab-delimited release.
- The dataset also provides a Stata source representation and a PDF codebook.
Request
curl -L -o mmALL_073120_csv.tab 'https://dataverse.harvard.edu/api/access/datafile/4291456'Format
Tab-delimited event rows with ID, country, region, dates, location, participant measures, protester identity and demands, violence, state-response fields, sources and notes.
Load into pandas and Parquet
Needs Python 3 with requests, pandas and pyarrow.
"""Mass Mobilization protest events -> pandas -> Parquet. No key."""
import io
import requests
import pandas as pd
URL = "https://dataverse.harvard.edu/api/access/datafile/4291456"
r = requests.get(URL, timeout=120)
r.raise_for_status()
df = pd.read_csv(io.BytesIO(r.content), sep="\t", low_memory=False)
df.to_parquet("mass_mobilization.parquet", index=False)
print(len(df), "events", df["country"].nunique(), "countries",
int(df["year"].min()), "to", int(df["year"].max()),
len(df.columns), "columns")Run by us on 2026-11-01 (python 3.13.5 | pandas 3.1.0 | pyarrow 26.0.0 | requests 2.34.2). Result: 17145 events 166 countries 1990 to 2020 31 columns
Limits
- Rate limit: Not stated.
- Coverage ends on 2020-03-31 and no continuing update schedule is stated.
- The checked tabular file was 15,625,472 bytes.
Quirks
- The Dataverse label ends in .tab even though the original uploaded source was CSV; read the served file as tab-delimited.
- Separate start and end day, month and year fields can contain missing components; validate dates before constructing timestamps.
- location is text, not latitude and longitude, and participants can be a count or a categorical description.
- The project website still describes an older 1990-2018 edition; the Dataverse 5.1 metadata and file extend through 2020-03-31.
Terms and attribution
- The Dataverse release is dedicated under CC0 1.0.
- The checked data, Stata representation and codebook files are unrestricted.
Sources
- https://dataverse.harvard.edu/api/datasets/:persistentId/?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/HTTWYL: “Mass Mobillization Data project protests against governments, all countries, 1990-2020.”
- https://dataverse.harvard.edu/api/datasets/:persistentId/?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/HTTWYL: “version 4.0 - 1990-March 31, 2020”
- https://massmobilization.github.io/about.html: “These data contain events where 50 or more protesters publicly demonstrate against government, resulting in more than 10,000 protest events.”
- https://dataverse.harvard.edu/api/datasets/:persistentId/?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/HTTWYL: “"rightsIdentifier":"CC0-1.0"”
Information and education only. Not financial, investment, legal or tax advice. Listings can be inaccurate, incomplete or out of date and are provided "as is". Free tiers, limits and licenses belong to each provider and can change, so check the provider's own terms before you rely on them. Terms & Disclaimer