This interdisciplinary project breaks new ground for historians in that it will be carried out using recent concepts and principles from social psychology, where social identity researchers have had success in explaining the limits of behaviour in rioting crowds; the role of authorities in the dynamics of such riots; and the process through which rioting spreads across different geographical locations. 

An overall survey of a wave of ~500 reform-related collective action events that occurred in Britain and Ireland after the rejection of the Second Reform Bill in the House of Lords in October 1831 was carried out in order to understand the dynamics of the spread of riots and to determine the locations of a series of detailed case studies.