Thursday, March 29, 2018
Ohio (InterContinental Chicago Magnificent Mile)
Social movements and political parties provide the two most important channels of democratic representation. Yet, the two strands of literature developed independently and party-movement interactions are rarely examined. The paper relies on both strands of literature and provides a comparative study of party-sponsored protests in 30 European countries. Thus, it takes the main collective actors of electoral democracies and asks, when do parties step outside of the electoral arena.
The paper relies on a novel protest event dataset, collected by semi-automated content analysis of 10 English language news agencies. The data covers protests in 30 countries between 2000 and 2015. To further explore the long-term dynamic hand-coded protest data from two Western (DE, UK) and two Eastern European countries (HU, PL) are analyzed.
While the over-time evolution of parties is often told as a story of increasing professionalization and withdrawal from society, the extent to which they sponsor protests vary. First, in the weakly institutionalized party systems of Eastern Europe, parties often mobilize in the 'streets'. Second, although moderate parties almost exclusively rely on the electoral arena, radical parties do not withdraw from society and rely on protests to achieve electoral success. Third, whereas in the West it is primarily the left who protests and parties on the right selectively mobilize in the two arenas, in the East parties on the right are more likely to protest.
The paper relies on a novel protest event dataset, collected by semi-automated content analysis of 10 English language news agencies. The data covers protests in 30 countries between 2000 and 2015. To further explore the long-term dynamic hand-coded protest data from two Western (DE, UK) and two Eastern European countries (HU, PL) are analyzed.
While the over-time evolution of parties is often told as a story of increasing professionalization and withdrawal from society, the extent to which they sponsor protests vary. First, in the weakly institutionalized party systems of Eastern Europe, parties often mobilize in the 'streets'. Second, although moderate parties almost exclusively rely on the electoral arena, radical parties do not withdraw from society and rely on protests to achieve electoral success. Third, whereas in the West it is primarily the left who protests and parties on the right selectively mobilize in the two arenas, in the East parties on the right are more likely to protest.
