Stuart Hill, Donald Rothchild and Colin Cameron,  

"Tactical Information and the Diffusion of Peaceful Protests"

in D.A. Lake and D. Rothchild eds.,
The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict: Fears, Diffusion and Escalation,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998, pp.61-88. 

The empirical portion of this paper models the monthly incidence of peaceful protests in seventeen Western industrialized nations from 1950 to 1982 using a dynamic fixed effects negative binomial model with asymptotics based on the number of time periods going to infinity. regressors include population, GDP per capita, ethnic and linguistic diversity, access to television and lagged protests.