Protesting Parties in Europe: A comparative analysis

Endre Borbáth,Swen Hutter

doi:10.1177/1354068820908023

Endre Borbáth, Swen Hutter

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068820908023

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Abstract

The article provides the first large-scale study of protest activities by political parties. The empirical analysis draws on original protest event data for 30 European countries based on semi-automated coding of news agencies. The article innovates by (a) proposing a standardized indicator for the extent to which protest and electoral politics relate to each other, (b) showing that parties’ involvement in protests differs across political contexts, and (c) mapping the profile of a typical party-sponsored event and a typical protesting party. Despite long-term trends toward differentiated modes of interest intermediation, the results indicate that a wide range of parties does protest. However, in highly differentiated contexts, the typical protesting party mirrors the outsider image of movement parties: it does not belong to a mainstream party family and has no government experience. By contrast, more strategic factors, such as opposition status, drive parties to the streets in less differentiated contexts.

Highlights

Europe’s party systems are in flux, as indicated by functionalist and structuralist perspectives on party competition
We show the average share of party-sponsored protests depending on the strength of civil society and democratic history
Relative to a context with strong civil society, the share of party-sponsored protests doubles in a context where civil society is comparatively weak, and it reaches over 20%

Summary

Introduction

Europe’s party systems are in flux, as indicated by functionalist and structuralist perspectives on party competition. Bornschier, 2010; de Wilde et al, 2019; Kriesi et al, 2012) Recent work in this tradition shows how Europe’s latest crises have reinforced long-term trends of part system transformation Hooghe and Marks, 2018; Rovny and Whitefield, 2019) Both perspectives neglect that the key driving forces may have changed in programmatic terms and in organizational form and action repertoire. Following McAdam and Tarrow’s (2010) forceful call almost a decade ago, social movement scholars have returned to study the manifold interactions between electoral and protest dynamics (for an overview, see Hutter et al, 2019).

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