The Duality of Claims and Events: The Greek Campaign Against the Troika's Memoranda and Austerity, 2010-2012

Abstract

Protest campaigns consist of connected public events to which participants assign shared meanings. Data from thirty-one large protest events that occurred in Greece between January 2010 and December 2012—protests challenging neoliberal austerity policies and the "Troika's" bailout package—enable us to illustrate a network-analytic approach to identify those connections. We treat claims as the linkages that assign a common meaning to different episodes of collective action, weaving them into a coherent national campaign. We also examine the ways that events provide a connection between different claims, merging them in distinctive political agendas. Agendas evolve over time, and while some thematic continuity is essential to the existence of a campaign, this does not imply total stability in protestors' agendas. Data from Greek and transnational newspapers, electronic websites, and other media sources reveal both the continuity and shifts over the three main phases of the antiausterity campaign.