The Economic Crisis and Political Protest: Relative, Perceived and Absolute Deprivation As Drivers of Mobilization

Under what condition does economic deprivation foster political protest? Incentive-based theories would predict mobilizing effects of increasing economic hardship. Resource-based arguments, in contrast, suggest that political alienation and thus abstention might be higher among the hardest hit social groups. In addition, the link between several possible forms of deprivation and the likelihood of political protests has remained underspecified in the social movement literature. In this paper, we suggest that deprivation can be conceptualized as inequality (in relative terms), as grievances (in terms of perceived deprivation) or as actual deprivation in terms of income or job loss.

The financial and economic crisis in Europe has had a highly differential impact on the economic hardship of different social groups across countries. This variation thus allows us to study economic deprivation as a driver of protest mobilization in a much more detailed way than is usually done in social movement research. In a comparative study on the dynamics of deprivation and political protests in 30 countries over 10 years, we scrutinize whether and which form of economic deprivation is related to a (de-)mobilization of political protest. Deprivation data are taken from the EU-SILC data sets, the protest data stem from a new, original content analysis of news wires.