Economic hardship, politicization and protest in Western Democracies

• In Event: Great Recession: Effect on Parties and Protest

Abstract

Political participation in general and protest in particular have usually been a matter of affluent socioeconomic resources with people of higher socio-economic status residing in wealthier countries protesting substantially more. The recent mobilization related to the economic crisis and growing economic inequality (such as anti-austerity protests and Occupy movements) and classical grievance theory suggest that some type of protest (different from the more often “affluent” type of protest) might be triggered by socio-economic deterioration. So far, protest of socio-economically deprived people has not been much examined. The paper asks questions: What is the role of socioeconomic hardship for people’s participation at protest? Under what conditions do poor people get mobilized? The main argument is that protest under hardship is activated by the combination of individual and macro-structural socio-economic scarcity under a crucial condition that the hardship is also politicized. High political saliency of socio-economic problems during economic crisis opens political space for diverse actors and redefinition of identities and transforms individual deprivation into collective mobilizing grievances. The study uses double filtering with ARFIMA methods followed by multi-level modeling to analyze repeated comparative surveys before and after economic crisis (ESS in 30 countries) that are combined with macro-level data on unemployment and aggregated survey data on public concern about employment (Eurobarometer). The paper shows that increased political salience of the national economic problems ripples routines of everyday politics and opens political space for mobilization of – in other occasions politically excluded – socioeconomically deprived people. Interestingly, if fewer people consider unemployment as a severe problem macro-structural socioeconomic hardship loses its mobilization effect and in contrast even dampens protest of socioeconomically deprived people.

Author

• Katerina Vrablikova, The Ohio State University