Economic grievances and political protest

Abstract

How do economic grievances affect citizens’ inclination to protest? Given rising levels of inequality and widespread economic hardship in the aftermath of the Great Recession, this question is crucial for political science: if adverse economic conditions depress citizens’ engagement, as many contributions have argued, then the economic crisis may well feed into a crisis of democracy. However, the existing research on the link between economic grievances and political participation remains empirically inconclusive. It is argued in this article that this is due to two distinct shortcomings, which are effectively addressed by combining the strengths of political economy and social movement theories. Based on ESS and EU‐SILC data from 2006–2012, as well as newly collected data on political protest in 28 European countries, a novel, more fine‐grained conceptualisation of objective economic grievances considerably improves our understanding of the direct link between economic grievances and protest behaviour. While structural economic disadvantage (i.e., the level of grievances) unambiguously de‐mobilises individuals, the deterioration of economic prospects (i.e., a change in grievances) instead increases political activity. Revealing these two countervailing effects provides an important clarification that helps reconcile many seemingly conflicting findings in the existing literature. Second, the article shows that the level of political mobilisation substantially moderates this direct link between individual hardship and political activity. In a strongly mobilised environment, even structural economic disadvantage is no longer an impediment to political participation. There is a strong political message in this interacting factor: if the presence of organised and visible political action is a decisive signal for citizens that conditions the micro‐level link between economic grievances and protest, then democracy itself – that is, organised collective action – can help sustain political equality and prevent the vicious circle of democratic erosion.

Disappointed Expectations: Downward Mobility and Electoral Change

“…Evidence from a longstanding literature on relative deprivation shows that discrepancies between expectations and reality have political consequences (e.g., Burgoon et al 2019; Geschwender 1964; Gurr 1970; Kurer et al 2019; Mitrea, Mühlböck, and Warmuth 2021; Paskov, Präg, and Richards 2021). Building on these insights, we propose that the discrepancies resulting from declining occupational mobility affect political behavior because those experiencing negative status discordance feel they have been denied the opportunity to secure the status they had come to expect for themselves based on standards set in childhood—expectations also encouraged by the postwar political consensus.…”

International Trade and Public Protest: Evidence from Russian Regions

“…Scholars have argued that people are more likely to participate in contentious political action when they are dissatisfied with the economic or political situation; when they are aggrieved (Davies 1962;Gurr 1970). While grievance-based explanations of protest have been discarded for some time, recent contributions have revived their importance and showed that people who feel left behind or dissatisfied with their economic situation turn to the streets to voice frustrations (Grasso and Giugni 2016;Kern, Marien, and Hooghe 2015;Kurer et al 2019). This is not only the case in advanced economies, but also applies to less developed contexts where the average protester has been shown to be driven by personal, economic dissatisfaction rather than political demands (Mueller 2018).…”

“…We concentrate on one dependent variable: whether a respondent indicated that s/he participated in a peaceful/lawful demonstration in the past 12 months. Using the protest item for recent participation reduces the potential of recall errors and measures more closely people's reaction to ongoing developments instead of their lifetime protest experience (Dodson 2015), which is why it has become the standard item used in the literature (Grasso and Giugni 2016;Kurer et al 2019).…”

La juventud después de la austeridad. Comportamiento y actitudes políticas

“…Small samples impede running detailed analyses of, for instance, personal economic circumstances, and how they affect young people's relationship to the political system. More recent research has focused attention on the importance of distinguishing between, for instance, economic grievances and feelings of relative deprivation (both in comparison to others and in comparison to one's own situation over time; see Kurer et al 2018) among the factors that explain protest mobilization in Europe.…”

“…Lack of resources is likely to produce apathy while a change in resources is more likely to mobilize protest actions (Kurer et al 2018). In light of changes in economic and labour conditions across Europe, the distinction between level of resources on the one hand, and changes in the endowment of resources on the other, could be key to understanding what drives young people out into the streets.…”