Erica Chenoweth
Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment
Crowd Counting Consortium
A public interest and scholarly project to document protests and demonstrations in the United States.
Contact Info
Links & Downloads
Part of
Related Programs
Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes Data Project, Women in Resistance Data Project
The Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) is a joint project of Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut that collects publicly available data on political protest events reported in the United States, including rallies, marches, demonstrations, and acts of civil disobedience.
The CCC first emerged from a collaborative effort by Jeremy Pressman (UConn) and Erica Chenoweth (HKS) to estimate the number of participants in the Women’s March on Washington (and its affiliated sister marches nationwide) on January 21, 2017. Since then, the project has expanded to provide near-real-time information on trends in the occurrence, themes, and scale of American protest activity.
CCC data are published monthly on a publicly accessible Dataverse, for use by scholars, journalists, movement leaders, and others. The NVA Lab regularly publishes commentary and analysis pieces based on the CCC data, advancing both scholarly and public understandings of protest in the US.
Informing the Public
Since its inception, the CCC data has been a valued public resource that has informed important conversations about American politics. Among other uses:
- CCC data were used to demonstrate that, at that time, the 2017 Women’s March was the largest single-day demonstration in US history.
- CCC data were used to demonstrate that, at that time, the 2018 March for Our Lives and #Enough Walkouts were the broadest single day demonstration if U.S. history (occurring in over 4400 distinct locations).
- CCC data underlie an influential New York Times analysis demonstrating that, at that time, protests in 2020 following George Floyd’s murder constituted the largest and broadest mobilization in U.S. history.
- Relatedly, CCC data support the claim that the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising was overwhelmingly peaceful, especially relative to the heavy-handed police response.
- CCC data underpin an analysis of the 2023-2024 pro-Palestine protests, which were also generally peaceful, despite common narratives that the protests were violent.
- Most recently, the CCC data have been used to rebut the narrative that there is “no resistance” to the second Trump administration. Instead, the CCC data demonstrate higher degrees of protest throughout 2025 than in 2017, a high degree of nonviolent discipline among anti-Trump protesters, and an increasing number of protests (and protest participants) in counties where Trump won majorities in 2024. The CCC data also demonstrated that the No Kings protests in June and October of 2025 were among the largest single-day demonstrations in US history.
Advancing Scholarship
Academics routinely turn to the CCC data to study protest, counter-protest, and state response. Articles and essays published by the CCC team since 2017 have collectively garnered more than 600 scholarly citations so far. See the links below for academic articles we have published that draw on CCC data.
Gratitude
We are grateful to the many staff, volunteers, research assistants, and collaborators who have contributed to this project over the years, as well as generous financial support that has helped to sustain this project.
Meet the Team
Soha Hammam
Research Project Manager, Nonviolent Action Lab
David Meyer
Senior Fellow, AY2025-2026
Jeremy Pressman
Senior Research Fellow, AY2025-2026
Amelia Roskin-Frazee
Predoctoral Fellow, AY2025-2026
Christopher Shay
Research Associate, Crowd Counting Consortium
Download the Data
Complete Dataset
Protest event data from CCC’s three phases — 2017-2020, 2021-2024, and 2025 to the present — can be downloaded from the project’s Dataverse.
Submit a Record
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
What kind of actions are you collecting?
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.
What do you intend to do with these data?
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.
Have your Human Research Subject boards approved this data collection?
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.
Where can I get the data?
The data and associated documentation are shared via the Harvard Dataverse:
https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/crowdcountingconsortium/
How should I cite these data?
Please include a citation to the Crowd Counting Consortium such as: Crowd Counting Consortium, crowdcounting.org, accessed September 17, 2021.
Where does your funding come from?
Funding is made possible in part by the Freedom Together Foundation, New Venture Fund, Humanity United, the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation, 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, the Scheidt Family Foundation, 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
Crowd Counting Consortium: Protest Themes in Biden’s First 100 Days
So far, the Crowd Counting Consortium has logged just over 5,300 events since Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021.
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium: FIPS Codes!
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium: Monthly Review: March 2021
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.
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium: Stop Asian Hate
Since the Atlanta-area murders, we have logged 126 events focused on this issue, most of them this past Saturday and Sunday, March 20–21.
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consoritum: Say Her Name: Breonna Taylor
So far, the Crowd Counting Consortium has identified 47 events honoring Taylor on the anniversary of her death in more than 30 localities.
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium: It’s the Climate Change, Stupid!
One issue has dominated environmental protest activity in the U.S. for at least the past four years, and that’s climate change.
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium: Monthly Review – February 2021
So far, we’ve recorded 980 protest events in the U.S. in February 2021, with about 29,000 to 35,000 reported participants in them.
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium: Dude, Where’s My Protest?
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium: Contours of the George Floyd Uprising
Just how large and broad was that wave of protests after the death of George Floyd? How destructive was it? And how did police and right-wing counter-protesters respond to it?
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium: Trump-Era Themes in U.S. Protests
Under the Trump administration, what did Americans protest about?
Article
The science of contemporary street protest: New efforts in the United States
Since the inauguration of Donald Trump, there has been substantial and ongoing protest against the Administration. Street demonstrations are some of the most visible forms of opposition to the Administration and its policies. This article reviews the two most central methods for studying street protest on a large scale: building comprehensive event databases and conducting field surveys of participants at demonstrations.