The German Protest Registrations Dataset

The German Protest Registrations Dataset covers protests that have been registered with demonstration authorities in 16 German cities. The data has been compiled from Freedom of Information requests and covers dates, organizers, topics, the number of registered participants, and for some cities the number of observed participants. Covered date ranges vary, with all cities covered in 2022, and 5 cities covered consistently from 2018 to 2022. In comparison to previous datasets that are largely based on newspaper reports, this dataset gives an unprecented level of detail, and is the largest dataset on protest events in Germany to date. The report gives an overview over existing datasets, explains the data retrieval and processing, displays the properties of the dataset, and discusses its limitations. Code and data are available on Github.

The dataset is provided in three subsets:

1. The 2018-2022 dataset contains only cities that have coverage throughout 2018-2022, and that also have the number of registered participants available. This results in a large dataset (about 40.000 entries) that strikes a balance between regional diversity (5 cities) and time coverage (5 years).
2. The 2022 dataset contains all cities that have data available in 2022, and also have the number of registered participants available. With 13 cities covered but only 12.500 overall entries, it is useful especially for the study of geographic variations.
3. The unfiltered dataset contains all data without restrictions on included cities and time ranges, overall 57.000 entries. It also contains cities where the number of registered participants is not available. 16 cities are included, with varying time ranges between 2012 and 2022. This dataset should not be used for direct analysis; but it may be used for the creation of alternative consistent sub-datasets similar to the two ones above.