Protests and counterprotests at the local level

National-level protest event data sets provide us with useful overviews of mobilization dynamics across different countries. However, they also have their limitations among others when it comes to counter-protests. In this paper, we will instead draw on local protest event analysis to study dynamics of protest and counter-protests in Germany. In the German national protest event dataset Prodat only about two percent of the protests are counterprotests. And about half of these counterprotests are (often large) anti-fascist protests against marches of the radical right. The other half is scattered across a multitude of issues, and Prodat often only lists during its 50 year observation period one or two counterprotests in most policy fields. How representative is this count? Are counterprotests (in Germany) really relatively rare events and do they mostly happen when leftist actors mobilize against the radical right? The problem with Prodat and other national protests event analyses is that they are biased by their choice of news sources. They usually focus on large national newspapers or even news agency reports which are highly selective regarding which protests manage to cross the newsworthiness threshold. Small and/or nonviolent counterprotests are unlikely to be reported, and thus are missing in national protest event datasets. In our paper we explore the pattern of protests and counterprotests through the much less selective protest reporting in local newspapers. In local newspapers a protest does not have to compete with other national political events but only with usually much less spectacular local political events. Local newspapers therefore cover local protests in a much more complete manner than national newspapers. They therefore should also provide a much more complete picture of counterprotests. Based on a protests event analysis of protests in four large German cities over a period of 20 years, we thus test whether the Prodat picture of rare and largely anti-fascist counter protests holds also with more complete and less biased data.