Erica Chenoweth
Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment
A public interest and scholarly project to document protests and demonstrations in the United States.
The Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC), a joint project of Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut, collects publicly available data on political crowds reported in the United States, including marches, protests, strikes, demonstrations, riots, and other actions.
The CCC emerged from a collaborative effort by Jeremy Pressman and Erica Chenoweth to accurately estimate the number of people who participated in the Women’s March on Washington (and its affiliated Sister Marchers worldwide) on January 21, 2017. Upon recognizing the growing public interest in up-to-date information on crowds — and in response to requests to continue the effort beyond the Women’s March — they and their volunteer colleagues established the CCC.
For more details, see the “View + Download the Data” section below.
Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment
Nonviolent Action Lab Research Associate
Research Project Manager, Nonviolent Action Lab
Our repository on GitHub contains a compiled and augmented version of the CCC data from all of the monthly sheets since the project’s inception in January 2017. We update this version of the dataset weekly on Wednesdays, usually no later than 4pm ET and with occasional exceptions around holidays and ends of the month. Instructions on how to access the dataset and detailed descriptions of its contents can be found on the repository’s landing page.
December 2021 Crowd Data (view).
November 2021 Crowd Data (view).
October 2021 Crowd Data (view).
September 2021 Crowd Data (view).
August 2021 Crowd Data (view).
July 2021 Crowd Data (view).
June 2021 Crowd Data (view).
May 2021 Crowd Data (view).
April 2021 Crowd Data (view).
March 2021 Crowd Data (view).
February 2021 Crowd Data (view).
January 2021 Crowd Data (view).
December 2020 Crowd Data (view).
November 2020 Crowd Data (view).
October 2020 Crowd Data (view).
September 2020 Crowd Data (view).
August 2020 Crowd Data (view).
July 2020 Crowd Data (view).
June 2020 Crowd Data (view).
May 2020 Crowd Data (view).
April 2020 Crowd Data (view).
March 2020 Crowd Data (view).
February 2020 Crowd Data (view).
January 2020 Crowd Data (view).
December 2019 Crowd Data (view).
November 2019 Crowd Data (view).
October 2019 Crowd Data (view).
September 2019 Crowd Data (view).
August 2019 Crowd Data (view).
July 2019 Crowd Data (view).
June 2019 Crowd Data (view).
May 2019 Crowd Data (view).
April 2019 Crowd Data (view).
March 2019 Crowd Data (view).
February 2019 Crowd Data (view).
January 2019 Crowd Data (view).
December 2018 Crowd Data (view).
November 2018 Crowd Data (view).
October 2018 Crowd Data (view).
September 2018 Crowd Data (view).
August 2018 Crowd Data (view).
July 2018 Crowd Data (view).
June 2018 Crowd Data (view).
May 2018 Crowd Data (view).
April 2018 Crowd Data (view).
March 2018 Crowd Data (view).
February 2018 Crowd Data (view).
January 2018 Crowd Data (view).
December 2017 Crowd Data (view).
November 2017 Crowd Data (view).
October 2017 Crowd Data (view).
September 2017 Crowd Data (view)(XLS).
August 2017 Crowd Data (view)(download in XLS).
July 2017 Crowd Data (view) (download).
June 2017 Crowd Data (view).
May 2017 Crowd Data (view).
April 2017 Crowd Data (view).
March 2017 Crowd Data (view)(download in xls).
February 2017 Crowd Data (view).
January 20-31, 2017 Data not including Women’s March (view).
1/21/2017 Women’s March Data (view; download in xls).
We only post records that we can confirm and verify through fact-checking. When you submit a record, be sure to provide a source that is publicly verifiable (e.g. a news report, a Facebook group, links to online photos with headcounts, etc) or describe the crowd-counting techniques used by onsite onlookers (e.g. sign-ins, counting through distributing flyers/handouts, counting from photos/videos, and/or other crowd density estimation techniques).
We will never post, release, or share identifying information that has not already been reported in the public domain.
Nevertheless, we urge you to avoid including personal identifying information in your submission.
We collect publicly available data on political crowds reported in the United States, including marches, protests, demonstrations, riots, and other actions. We do not count crowds at meetings, teach-ins or academic workshops, panel discussions, fundraisers, or town halls.
Our goal is to make the aggregate data on crowd numbers publicly available for each event. We are collecting this data in the public interest and to further scholarly research.
This is a public-interest project. The University of Denver’s Office of Research Integrity and Education determined that the project does not qualify as human subjects research and therefore does not require further review or oversight by its Institutional Review Board. The University of Connecticut made a similar determination.
Please see the links above. Explore the GitHub here.
Please include a citation to the Crowd Counting Consortium such as: Crowd Counting Consortium, crowdcounting.org, accessed September 17, 2021.
Funding is made possible in part by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut, Alan R. Bennett and the UConn POLS Honors Bennett RA program, and the Russell Sage Foundation. Previously, we received support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York through the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and the Humility & Conviction in Public Life initiative, a project of the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute.
We have collaborated with countlove.org, a volunteer group that developed a webcrawler to identify protests and demonstrations on a daily basis.
Commentary
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Commentary
In late 2022, I guessed that the surge in anti-LGBTQ+ right-wing protests we saw in the summer and fall of last year would ebb after the elections.
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Each year since 2009, people around the world have gathered on March 31 (or close to it) to mark International Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV).
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For the past three legislative cycles, state lawmakers have tabled record numbers of bills that harmfully target LGBTQ+ people or seek to enforce chauvinistic ideas about sexuality and gender norms.
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CCC logged more than 13,400 left-wing protests across more than 2,000 different U.S. cities and towns
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CCC logged more than 5,700 right-wing events in 2022
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This is a guest post by Mason Holland, an undergraduate student at the University of Connecticut majoring in Political Science. He also serves as President of the Student Body.
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So far, the Crowd Counting Consortium has logged just over 5,300 events since Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021.
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The Crowd Counting Consortium recorded more than 1,800 protest events in the U.S. in March 2021, with roughly 88,000 to 125,000 participants in the events.