Global Austerity Protests

Abstract

The uprisings, protests, and campaigns against economic reforms emerged as a global pattern over the past 45 years. Since the mid‐1970s, major protests have erupted every year in multiple countries over some form of government austerity measures. Scholars group such measures into a family of like‐minded policies that include a wide range of governmental actions, including: subsidy cuts to lower‐ and middle‐class groups, wage freezes, price increases, massive layoffs, regressive taxation, deregulation, privatization, and free trade. Because economic‐based protests are some of the largest and most common forms of contention, their causal determinants and political consequences offer important insights to the dynamics of collective action in general.