Different worlds of contention? Protest in Northwestern, Southern and Eastern Europe

Abstract

Despite the voluminous literature on the 'normalisation of protest', the protest arena is seen as a bastion of left-wing mobilisation. While citizens on the left readily turn to the streets, citizens on the right only settle for it as a 'second best option'. However, most studies are based on aggregated crossnational comparisons or only include Northwestern Europe. We contend the aggregate-level perspective hides different dynamics of protest across Europe. Based on individual-level data from the European Social Survey (2002-2016), we investigate the relationship between ideology and protest as a key component of the normalisation of protest. Using hierarchical logistic regression models, we show that while protest is becoming more common, citizens with different ideological views are not equal in their protest participation across the three European regions. Instead of a general left predominance, we find that in Eastern European countries, right-wing citizens are more likely to protest than those on the left. In Northwestern and Southern European countries, we find the reverse relationship, left-wing citizens are more likely to protest than their right-wing counterparts. Lessons drawn from the protest experience in Northwestern Europe characterised by historical mobilisation by the New Left are of limited use for explaining the ideological composition of protest in the Southern and Eastern European countries. We identify historical and contemporary regime access as the mechanism underlying regional patterns: citizens with ideological views that were historically in opposition are more likely to protest. In terms of contemporary regime access, we find that partisanship enhances the effect of ideology, while ideological distance from the government has a different effect in the three regions. As protest gains in importance as a form of participation, the paper contributes to our understanding of regional divergence in the extent to which citizens with varying ideological views use this tool.

Civic and Political Engagement during the Multifaceted COVID‐19 Crisis

“…Compared to previous crises (such as the financial or refugee crisis), the multifaceted character of the COVID‐19 crisis also seems more ambiguous in terms of how it may relate to individual‐level ideological beliefs and affect well‐established links between ideology and participation. As the literature documents, left‐wing individuals are more likely to engage in non‐electoral forms of participation across Western Europe (e.g., Borbáth and Gessler 2020). At the same time, the uncertainty and contestation linked with the political measures to fight the crisis might have activated citizens from across the ideological spectrum.…”

Protesting Parties in Europe: A comparative analysis

“…As argued before, Kitschelt (2003) highlights a long-term process which began in the 1970s that has resulted in a twofold transformation of European party systems: a first wave driven by the mobilization of new social movements and left-libertarian parties in the 1970s and a second wave driven by the mobilization of the populist radical right since the 1990s (Kriesi et al, 2012). Based on the scholarly literature, we know that these transformations have been much less pronounced in the countries in Southern and Eastern Europe (Borbáth and Gessler, 2020;Hutter and Kriesi, 2019). Overall, we thus expect that party-sponsored protests are more likely in countries with a shorter democratic history, given that the learning processes at the core of the differentiation argument take time and depend on a democratic context.…”

Protest as One Political Act in Individuals’ Participation Repertoires: Latent Class Analysis and Political Participant Types

“…Scholars of political behavior have long recognized the importance of studying protest, and a vibrant line of research on this political activity continues to yield new insights. For example, recent advances include studies on methodological approaches for investigating street protest (Fisher et al, 2019), the future of nonviolent resistance (Chenoweth 2020), the relationship between dissatisfaction and protest (Christensen, 2016), and regional distinctions in protest and ideology (Borbáth & Gessler, 2020). These studies represent an extensive literature on protest that focuses on this specific political act as worthy of close attention within the broader study of political participation.…”