It's Not the Left: Ideology and Protest Participation in Old and New Democracies (original) (raw)
Related papers
Word on the Street: The Persistence of Leftist-dominated Protest in Europe
West European Politics, 2015
Classic studies of protest politics have traditionally defended the dominant left-wing orientation of protesters. However, some recent research has highlighted the general spread of protest by the increasing participation of right-wing individuals. Has this process meant an 'ideological normalisation' of protesters? The present article tackles this question by examining competing hypotheses regarding the relationship between ideology and political protest. Through a hierarchical multilevel design, the article tests whether left-wing (or right-wing) supporters are more likely to stay at home when leftwing (right-wing) parties are in power and whether they intensify their protest activities when they are more distant from the government's ideological position. The article shows that left-wing individuals protest more under right-wing governments than under left-wing governments and yet, they are the group which protest the most also under left-wing governments. Both party mobilisation and values appear to be behind these individuals' greater propensity to participate regardless of the governments' ideological orientation.
There is a known ideological asymmetry in contentious political participation, such that protest and similar political tools are more often found among liberals' than conservatives' repertoires of political engagement. Yet, there is little systematic investigation of this asymmetry in a comparative context. I draw on data from the European Social Survey and employ multi-level modeling to examine the relationship between ideology and contentious political participation in 20 European countries. In contrast to post-communist countries, I expect " Westernized " countries-those with long-standing liberal democratic and welfare-state traditions-to evidence a stronger relationship between left-right ideological self-placement and contentious political participation, due to the meaningfulness of ideological labels in describing political orientations in those contexts. In line with expectations, I find that conservatives are less likely to participate in protest in Western countries, but this relationship does not hold in post-communist countries. Results from this preliminary study offer a basis for future research into the role of ideology and individual-level psychology differences in conditioning protest participation in different political contexts. 1
1995
This paper analyzes the impact of changing political opportunities, and more particularly of changes in the composition of government, on the levels, political leaning and forms of protest mobilization. The literature provides us with contradictory expectations as to these questions, some stressing openess of the political system, some closure, and some a combination of openness and closure as the situation most conducive to protest mobilization. To assess these hypotheses, we use data on protest events in four West European countries (Germany, France, Great Britain and the Netherlands) for the period 1975-1979, as well as similar data derived from another project on protests in Germany between 1950 and 1991. Altogether, this provides us with data on protest mobilization (differentiated in left-wing and other protest) under fifteen different governmental constellations, which can roughly be classified as left, right and mixed. The data show, first, that mobilization by left-wing movements in Western Europe by far exceeds mobilization by the Right. Second, the mobilization of left-wing movements is concentrated during periods of right-wing government, whereas the Right tends to mobilize most strongly when the Left is in power. However, the highest levels of mobilization, of the Left and to some extent also of the Right, occur when mixed governments, in which power is shared by parties of the Left and of the Right, are in power. Self-evident as some of these results may seem at first sight, they run against the thrust of much of the recent social movement literature. In particular they make clear that in order to explain fluctuations in levels of social movement mobilization we should not only take into account (positive) opportunities for protest, but also its necessity from the point of view of potential activists and its relative attractiveness compared to more conventional ways of pressuring governments. In this view, the most conducive situations for mobilization are those in which protest seems both opportune and necessary; a situation that for instance prevails when mixed, often internally divided governmeents are in power.
Protest Behavior in European Societies. The Role of Individual Incentives and the Political Context
Empirical research has provided different explanations for political protest. Yet, from a cost-benefit perspective the motivation for protest behavior still remains unclear. Why do people engage in protest activities, even though participation is costly and collective outcomes are available to everybody? This paper aims to provide an explanation for this paradox by analyzing which individual-level incentives foster protest participation, and by considering the specific political context in which protest activities take place. We rely mainly upon the European Social Survey (ESS) data from 2002–2003, which covers a large number of countries, and includes important items for measuring political protest. The findings suggest that both individual-level incentives and contextual features are crucial to take into account when explaining protest activity. More specifically, we find that collective and selective incentives motivate protest in most European countries, and that protest levels are higher in systems with proportional representation, in less fractionalized systems and in more polarized systems. Looking at interactions between contextual and individual-level factors, we find that people are less likely to be driven to protest by collective incentives in countries where left parties are in the cabinet.
Dissatisfaction with the economic situation and perceived governmental inefficacy in regard to the financial crisis has spawned a widespread feeling of political distrust across Europe. This distrust has been translated into protests against institutional authority that aims at either expanding democratic procedures or supporting xenophobic and populist measures. This research uses European Social Survey data to compare exclusive and inclusive protesters with regard to a number of personal and social values, attitudes toward democratic principles, and different life conditions and socio‐economic resources. It also considers contextual factors to investigate how different protesters' profiles are interwoven with socio‐economic conditions. The results of a multilevel latent profile analysis show that exclusive and inclusive protesters, despite sharing similar levels of political distrust, differ with regard to key values and political attitudes, and these differences are related to individual and collective living conditions. We argue that unfavourable living conditions play a non‐negligible role in increasing the probability of easy (i.e., populist) scapegoat political attitudes. Further support for this hypothesis is provided by the cross‐country analysis, which shows that higher levels of exclusive protest are present in countries that were characterized by worse living conditions before the economic crisis.
The political left more often wields protest as a political tool than right. Somewhat surprisingly, there has been little careful investigation of this asymmetry to date. I show that by examining the interaction between individual-level differences across ideology and authoritarianism and contextual factors, we gain leverage in understanding the protest asymmetry. Using an experimental design, I find that contentious protests and protesters that are disrespectful of police reduce public support. Moreover, I find that liberals and conservatives, and nonauthoritarians and authoritarians, are affected by the protest context in different ways, and this has implications for their political behavior. In my study, conservatives were less supportive than liberals of protests that were disrespectful of police and were demobilized by violent protests. For authoritarians, however, violence does not decrease their support or mobilization. Rather, what decreases support and mobilization among authoritarians are protests that are disrespectful of authorities.
kppcenter.org
In the recent decades protest participation has become most widely accepted and practiced form of citizen engagement in western democracies. Many researchers believe protest participation is crucial for democracy to be consolidated and effective, and previous studies have shown that protest participation is one of the main characteristics of a democratic public. Though protest is on the increase in western democracies, it declined in postcommunist democracies from 1990 to 2000. The bulk of participation research still comes from western countries and less is known about participation patterns of postcommunist and especially post-Yugoslav citizens. More importantly, previous cross-national studies have mostly not dealt with the motivations behind protest participation in post-Yugoslav countries. The aim of our research was twofold: firstly, we compared levels of protest participation (signing petitions, joining in boycotts, and attending lawful/peaceful demonstrations) in three regions: seven post-Yugoslav countries (BiH, Croatia, Kosovo, FYR Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia), seventeen established EU democracies, and nine East-Central European EU member states. Secondly, we analyzed the relationship between protest participation and prodemocratic political culture (i.e. democracy index consisting of items indicating acceptance of democracy and rejecting authoritarian rule) in all three regions. We employed the newest (2008) wave of European Values Study, which consists of representative national surveys. The results indicated that post-Yugoslav population is almost as protest oriented (Mprotest = 1.89) as citizens in western countries (M = 1.93), and significantly more than ECE EU member states (M = 1.55). Interestingly, within post-Yugoslav countries, citizens of Kosovo and Macedonia report the highest levels of protest potential. The results also showed that protest participation is positively and statistically significantly associated with prodemocratic orientations in all three regions, as well as within all seven post-Yugoslav national samples. If Europeanization of West Balkan countries is understood in terms of their populations taking part in elite-challenging behaviour (e.g. protest participation) motivated by pro-democratic orientations, The WBP Review website: http://www.kppcenter.org/wbpreview.html Subscriptions/Submissions/Reprint Permissions/Distribution: journal@kppcenter.org This electronic version of the WBP Review article is intended for personal, individual use. Distribution in any way, including online posting, without prior permission by the publisher is prohibited. The Western Balkans Policy Review Volume 2, Issue 2 (2012) 96
Populism and Protest Intensity: A Cross-National Analysis
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2021
Populist studies are increasingly interested in the effects that populism has on political systems of contemporary democracies. This article analyzes the relationship between populist parties and politicians and the intensity of political protest. Arguing that populists generate feelings of anger and outrage at the establishment politicians, develop close relationships with social movements, and instigate further polarization and resistance from the opposition, the existence of populist actors in a political system is expected to generate more political protests. Empirical testing using crossnational figures considers the case of both the prevalence of populist parties in European countries and the existence of a populist politician as the head of government in European, Latin American, and North American countries. The results testify to strong positive correlations in both cases demonstrating the potential that populism has for socio-political destabilization. However, when tests are performed in order to observe whether this relationship holds within different geographical and temporal spaces, strong negative relationships are shown with populists prior to the year 2000 and positive ones afterwards. Finally, once the ideological disposition of the populist leaders is accounted for, the results testify to a diverging pattern; whereas the populist radical right and radical left are strongly associated with increasing protests after the year 2000, in the decade prior, centrist or neoliberal populism demonstrated a significantly negative correlation with protest intensity. This is especially true of the populist radical right that tends to rise alongside mobilizations for autocracy as well as provoke mass mobilizations for democracy among the opposition.
Protest and Liberal Democratic Performance: A Panel Analysis
nuff.ox.ac.uk
The relationship between protest and democracy has been investigated among countries prior to democratic transition, but seldom after this point. This paper attempts to fill the gap, by first developing a formal model of the interaction between protestors and government under a procedurally democratic regime. This suggests that the level of democratic performance in a new democracy should be negatively related to the level of protest, while the reverse is likely in older countries. This relationship is then tested using a panel dataset of 72 procedural democracies over a 10-year period. Two measures of democracy are employed: the protection of civil liberties and the effective operation of horizontal accountability. Post-transition protest appears to be associated with inferior protection of civil liberties and more delegative executives. These findings run counter to those of studies that have looked at protest's effect on transition. The relationships hold up when the endogeneity of protest is controlled for with instrumental variables estimation. Furthermore, consistent with the model, the negative association is found to be stronger among new (post-1974) democracies, suggesting that protest should be given serious consideration as a possible cause of the poor performance of third-wave democracies.