Demos against the right
How do the different numbers of participants come about?
It is unclear how many thousand people in Hamburg demonstrated against right-wing extremism on Friday.
© Stephan Wallocha / Picture Alliance
According to the police, almost a million people demonstrated against the right at the weekend – or was it more? The fact that the number of participants varies so much is due to the measurement method and the signal of the numbers.
Were there 50,000, 80,000 or 130,000 people who gathered on the Jungfernstieg in Hamburg on Friday afternoon to demonstrate against right-wing extremism and the AfD? As impressive as the response to the revelations from the research medium “Correctiv” was, the discrepancy in the ones circulating Participation numbers are astonishing.
The numbers, as proven not least by the absurd allegations of forgery from Björn Höcke and other voices from the right-wing camp, are political. The question seems all the more important: How do you actually measure so many people in a relatively small area?
Participation numbers are based on estimates of total area
There are different methods for this. At smaller demonstrations, it actually happens that counting is done by hand at the various entrances. When a demo train starts moving, the row counting method is primarily used. In this, the rows of people passing by are multiplied by an estimate of the number of people in each row.
However, if a lot of people gather in a certain place, such as on the weekend in front of the Bundestag in Berlin or on the Jungfernstieg in Hamburg, you have to use an estimate of the total area. To arrive at the total number of participants, the number of square meters is multiplied by the density value. According to the calculations of the late American journalist Herbert Jacobs, in a loose arrangement with an arm’s length distance between these people, this is approximately 1. In a dense crowd, such as at a festival, there would be four people per square meter.
For example, if an area is 40,000 square meters, like the meadow in front of the Bundestag, one can assume a crowd of around 60,000 people with the estimated density of standing people of around 1.5. The sociologist Stephan Poppe from the University of Leipzig is leaving in an interview with Deutschlandfunk from 2020 assumes that the measurement error with this method is around 20 to 30 percent. If more people demonstrate, the measurement error taken into account also increases.
Demo numbers are political
A relative magnitude can therefore be determined with relative certainty. And yet the media in particular have to be careful with the reported figures. In most cases, the participants are counted by the police and organizers. Protest researchers like Poppe consider these numbers to be unreliable. The organizers in particular have an intention to make the numbers higher. The more people there are at a demonstration, the more determined and emphatic the protest signal ultimately appears.
However, there is also a ray of hope in the inaccuracy. In the future, neither gut feeling nor area estimates will provide information about participant numbers, but rather software programs. Video footage from drones could capture accumulations more accurately. To date, this technical process has not yet been used across the board in Germany, explains Poppe Interview with Bavarian Radio. However, he predicts that this could well be the case in ten years.
Sources:Deutschlandfunk, Bavarian radio