Trust in institutions and protest participation : a comparison of established and postcommunist EU democracies (original) (raw)

In recent decades protest participation has become one of the most widely accepted and practiced forms of citizen engagement in democratic countries. Many researchers argue that protest participation is crucial for consolidation and functioning of democracies, and past studies have shown that at the individual leve protest participation is associated with prodemocratic attitudes, though past research has rarely compared motivations behind protest participation in established and postcommunist European democracies. In addition, the majority of studies employed single-level analyses, not taking into account country-level characteristics, or vice versa. We investigated associations between macro-level country characteristics and single-level sociodemographic and political cultural variables (prodemocratic attitudes index used by Klingemann et al., 2006). Using multilevel modelling allowed us to examine simultaneously the effect of individual-level as well as group-level predictors of protest participation (signing petitions, joining in boycotts, and attending lawful demonstrations). We hypothesized that levels of socioeconomic development and communist past would prove to be the strongest macropredictors of levels of protest participation (Inglehart and Welzel, 2007), and that prodemocratic orientations positively affect protest participation, even when controlling for other individual and state characteristics. We employed the representative natiional samples of 2008 of wave of European Values Study. The results indicated that 1) higher levels of socioeconomic development were the only significant makro-predictor of protest participation, while countries’ GINI index of income inequality, continuous years as a democracy, postcommunist past and present levels of quality of democratic institutions (Freedom House scores) all proved non-significant. At the individual level prodemocratic attitudes had a positive effect on protest participation, even after controlling for other relevant characteristics. Among the latter, male gender, higher education, higher income and larger size of the residential settlement all had a significant positive effect, while higher age had a negative effect on protest participation. Finally, the participation–prodemocratic attitudes link was stronger in established democracies. Based on the study results authors conclude that institutions of representative democracy, political elites and policy makers should view protest behaviour as a democratic potential, since it is not only becoming increasingly popular and relevant form of expression of citizens’ voice in Europe, but because mainly the prodemocratic oriented public is most likely to protest.