Financial Crisis, Opportunity, Innovation, and Protest Mobilization: The Case of Iceland

• In Event: 463 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 03. Cultural Framing and Mobilization in a Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The 2008 financial collapse in Iceland triggered a series of public meetings that eventually developed into popular protests bringing down the country’s ruling government in January 2009. I rely on grounded work (qualitative interviews, discourse analysis) to explore how the financial crisis triggered these enormous protests. I argue that it did so by undermining the legitimacy of the ruling authorities that were thus unable to provide credible framing of the crisis. Moreover, the crisis disrupted the public’s taken-for-granted reality, creating a shared focus on defining it. Perceiving the situation as a political opportunity, activists and critics organized public meetings and framed the crisis as a moral-democratic crisis calling for reform by means of protest. My grounded work illustrates how alignment with the emergent collective action frame, and the underlying political-ideological interests, played an important role in mobilizing individual citizens to participate in the protests.

Author

• Jon Gunnar Bernburg, University of Iceland