The widespread opposition to unprecedented austerity measures in Greece provides a unique opportunity to study the causes of mass protest. This article reports the results of a survey of the adult population in which two-thirds of the respondents supported protest and 29 per cent reported actual involvement in strikes and/or demonstrations during 2010. Relative deprivation is a significant predictor of potential protest, but does not play any role in terms of who takes part in strikes or demonstrations. Previous protest participation emerges as a key predictor of actual protest. This study seeks to place these results within a comparative context, contrasting Greece with other countries facing similar challenges, and discusses the implications for the future of austerity politics.

The ‘environment’ as a political issue has had a mixed history. Its sudden upsurge in the late 1960s was followed by many ups and downs. It has, however, continued to press itself on to the political agenda in various forms. Most recently, the rise of green parties in Western Europe has demonstrated that the environment is not one of many issues which come and go but has led to more fundamental political change.

The privatization of the water industry was one of the most controversial and turbulent privatizations of the 1980s. The government undertook the project somewhat reluctantly, then the first plans had to be withdrawn, but eventually, the privatization of the industry was successfully completed in 1989. In this article, we first set out to provide a thorough account of the process of privatizing water, based on primary sources and exhaustive interviews. In doing so, we identity some major problems of established theories of British policy making: the process of water privatization clearly does not conform to any single model of policy making. Instead, individual ‘episodes’ of the policy process conform to different models. Arguing that existing theories of British policy making may have focused too narrowly on routine decision‐making processes, we propose that a theory of the transformation of policy communities is required to understand the dynamics of radical policy change in Britain.

In light of the emergence of mass protest against the austerity measures taken by the Greek government in 2010, we investigate whether these protests mobilized just the "usual suspects" of left-wing trade union activists, or if a new protest generation emerged. Using a general population survey carried out in December 2010, we find that almost one-third of the adult Greek population had taken part in anti-austerity protests, but less than one in five had been first-time protesters. Comparing new protesters with veteran protesters and nonprotesters, we find that new protest recruits do not fit the expected pattern in many respects. In particular, new demonstrators are less left wing than veterans and do not differ significantly from nondemonstrators, thus fitting the model of "apprentice" protesters. For the recruitment of new strikers, on the other hand, factors such as trade union membership and support for left-wing parties are more important.

The use of political violence to attain political goals has long been a source of concern. Once thought to be exclusive to countries with high levels of general violence, recent evidence suggests that harassment and intimidation of political elites in the UK is more widespread than previously thought. Using data from the 2017 general election candidate survey, we find that four in every ten candidates experienced at least one type of harassment. Evidence suggests that women and young candidates are more likely to suffer from harassment and intimidation. We conclude by formulating an agenda for future research, focussing, in particular, on the perception of harassment and the effect of harassment on political careers.

What are the key questions that political scientists investigating Green parties in government have to address? What are the possible contributions of a variety of theories and approaches to the explanation of the Green governmental experience, in a cross-national context? The international experience with Green party governmental participation is reviewed, followed by a discussion of past work and future challenges to explain Green parties' entry into government, their performance in government, the impact of government on them, and the conditions for their survival in or exit from government.

Drawing on surveys of voters and MPs in Greece, this article analyses elite-mass interaction on key policy (austerity, European integration, immigration) and ideological issues after the 2012 elections. We find that while for the government parties, New Democracy and PASOK, the level of congruence is quite high, MPs from opposition parties (SYRIZA, Golden Dawn) place themselves in more exposed positions in comparison with their voters. The observed substantial variation in the intensity and direction of congruence, across parties and issue preferences in Greece, reinforces the view that the dimensionality of political contestation is not reducible to a single ideological dimension.

The apparent ubiquity of protest in recent years and the rise of Occupy movements across the world have fuelled claims that a new style of mobilisation is emerging which is markedly different from previous social movements. Analysing a series of original survey data, this article engages with this debate by providing a panoramic account of how the anti-austerity movement evolved in Greece, comparing the drivers of protest in three distinct protest waves. Contrary to expectations, the rise of the Greek version of the Indignados during 2011 did not decisively transform the anti-austerity movement that emerged in 2010, which mainly displayed characteristics typically associated with 'old' social movements. However, elements of the 'new social movements' approach featured more prominently in the third wave of protest, beginning in mid-2012 and culminating in January 2015 with victory for SYRIZA, the party which channelled the anti-austerity movement into the political scene. The model developed to study protest in non-electoral arenas also performs well to explain the success of SYRIZA in the electoral arena, highlighting the reciprocal but understudied relationship between mobilisation and electoral politics.