Protest in Southern Europe during the Crisis: When Do People Take to the Streets?

The Great Recession hit most strongly Southern European countries, where it had terrible consequences for the economy, employment, the welfare state, and more globally for citizens’ lives and well-being. Thus, the crisis led to a growing political dissatisfaction among citizens, which was highly visible in the streets as citizens started to protest against austerity measures, but also against what they perceived as their governments incapacity to handle the crisis and to provide solutions to it. In fact, to a certain extent the Great Recession fueled political crises in Southern Europe. In this paper, we focus on one aspect of the political crisis, namely protest events in the form of demonstrations, strikes, and political violence. We present trends in protest before and during the crisis in four Southern European countries: Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. This allows us to compare the intensity of protest across countries and to show how economic hardship and political dissatisfaction contribute to increasing protest. Furthermore, we pay particular attention to the interplay between street protests and institutional politics. We propose to explain the timing of peaks in protest in relation to key events related to electoral cycles and international interventions in national economies. In order to do so, we use a new dataset generated through automated content analysis of newswires developed to capture protest events in Europe from 2000 to 2015. Thus, our paper contributes to the understanding of the on-going political crisis by highlighting variations in levels and sources of protest during the crisis.