Protest Mobilization Research Articles

Resilience of Public Spheres in a Global Health Crisis

The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted “normal” modes of public sphere functioning and activated an experimental mode of coping, reinventing forms of publicness and communicative exchanges. We conceptualise the social responses triggered by the crisis as particular forms of public sphere resilience and assess the role of digitalisation and digital spaces in the emergence of distinct modes and dynamics of resilience. Four areas of enhanced public sphere experimentation are examined with respect to our conceptualisation: political consumerism, digital modes of solidarity, political protest mobilisation, and news consumption. We discuss overarching features of public sphere resilience across societal sub-spheres and highlight the dynamics and hybridities which structure the emerging public spaces. Resilience practices are accompanied by dynamics of politicisation and depoliticisation coupled with shifting boundaries of publicness and privateness. Our observations likewise reveal the dynamic interplay between resilience and resistance.

Роль цифровизации в трансформации российского политического протеста

The study identifies four key trends, which show the impact of digitalization of Russian political protest. The first is that Runet social networks have become an instrument of protest mobilization of different segments of Russian society. The second trend shows that digitalization has contributed to the growth of protest sentiments among young people. The third trend shows the possibilities of transfer of protest moods to the virtual space. The fourth trend is a growth of the activity of the non-systemic opposition, which got the opportunity to create an alternative political agenda through social media on the Runet.

Protest Event Dataset for Croatia, Portugal, Serbia and Spain

‘Disobedient Democracy: A Comparative Analysis of Contentious Politics in the European Semi-periphery’ is a research project implemented by the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Zagreb, in the period 2016-2021, led by Principal Investigator Danijela Dolenec and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (IZ11Z0_166540 – PROMYS). The overall objective of the project is to explore how protest politics advances democracy by collecting and analyzing data on protest mobilizations in four countries: Portugal, Spain, Croatia and Serbia.‎

Taking stock of MENA political science after the uprisings

ABSTRACT This Special Issue demonstrates the scope and breadth of the response by political scientists to the 2011 Arab uprisings. The contributions show the significant, rigorous development of understanding key mechanisms and issues such as protest mobilization, repression, sectarianism and international alliances. They also demonstrate the enduring relevance of the Area Studies Controversy, the value of building and exploiting new data sources, and the importance of close attention to cases. At the same time, they reveal growing problems with access to Middle Eastern countries for political science research. The articles reveal intriguing similarities and differences between the European and American fields, and the potential for productive dialogue.

“We Shall Overcome”: First-Person Plural Pronouns From Search Volume Data Predict Protest Mobilization Across the United States

Collective action is a key driver of social and political change within societies. So far, the main factor mobilizing individuals into collective action remains the extent to which they feel identified with a protesting group (i.e., social identification). Although the link between social identification and collective action is well-established, current evidence relies mostly on self-report data. To tackle this issue, we combined real-life protest counts in the United States (2017–2020) with online search data (Google Trends) for pronouns indicating a “group” mind-set (first-person plural pronouns; e.g., “we,” “us”). Time series analyses indicated that weekly fluctuations in searches (N = 164) predict both protest and protester counts over time. Confirmatory mixed models then showed that a 1% increase in pronoun searches was linked with +13.67% protests (95% CI [4.02, 23.32]) and +47.45% protesters (95% CI [26.54, 68.36]) the following week. These original results have important implications for the ecological study and quantification of collective action dynamics in psychology.

Networks of Conflict and Cooperation

Conflict and cooperation do not result from isolated individual actions. In settings such as insurgency, interstate conflict, protest mobilization, and informal governance, actors are highly interdependent. The study of networks aims to identify what the relevant interdependencies are and, crucially, how they shape conflict and cooperation outcomes. Although this is a relatively new research area, its early results convincingly establish that networks matter. Social networks provide information, transmit peer pressure, and structure interactions in ways that help groups overcome social dilemmas. With much research documenting the importance of particular outcomes in particular areas, the next major step will be putting the pieces together. Which connections between actors matter in which circumstances and how? The groundwork has been well laid for this large future research endeavor.

Workforces and local communities against corporate restructuring: a comparative case study of resistance to plant closures in Northern Spain

ABSTRACT The article examines the formation of local networks of resistance to production relocation plans. We present evidence from three case studies characterized by strong local defiance to plant closure plans in three American-owned transnational companies with four production sites in Northern Spain. The article explores the repertoire of protest and support mobilization leading the workforces to forge local alliances with trade unions, public authorities and other local community organizations and collectives. We focus on labour conflicts that transcend company boundaries through mobilizing urban communities. The methodology used is qualitative. Our analysis is grounded on a theoretically informed comparative case study based on the literature on power relations and micro-political struggles in transnational companies. We also make use of conceptual insights from the labour geography perspective. The article delves into the contra-hegemonic potential of labour-community alliances. Our findings substantiate the role of micro-politics in transnational companies and reveal opportunities and constraints for effective local responses to corporate restructuring.

Protest Mobilization, Concessions, and Policy Change in Autocracies

Protest Mobilization, Concessions, and Policy Change in Autocracies

The Advantage of the Right in Social Media News Sharing

We analyze social media activity during one of the largest protest mobilizations in U.S. history to examine ideological asymmetries in the posting of news content. We extract the list of URLs shared on social media during the mobilization period and we characterize those web sites in terms of their audience reach and the ideological composition of that audience. We also analyze the reliability of the sites in terms of the credibility and transparency of the information they publish. We show that there is no evidence of unreliable sources having any prominent visibility during the protest period, but we do identify asymmetries in the ideological slant of the sources shared, with a clear bias towards right-leaning domains. These results support the “conservative advantage” thesis, which points to the structural conditions that allow better message production from the right. Our results suggest that online networks are contested spaces where the activism of progressive movements coexists with the narratives of mainstream media, which gain visibility under the same stream of information (or hashtags) but whose reporting is not necessarily aligned with the activists’ goals.

The Anatomy of Impatience: Exploring Factors behind 2020 Labor Unrest in Belarus

The wave of labor unrest that accompanied Belarusian post-election protests had no precedents in the country's independent history or recent post-Soviet political protest mobilizations. These protests challenge the prevalent trend in the current literature on the post-Soviet working class to stress its weakness in terms of organization, as well as structural and material resources. This article relies on a database of workplace-related protest events (August 10–September 30) and a selection of statements, interviews, and social media discussions among participants of the protests, in order to explain this unexpected activation of the seemingly passive Belarusian working class. The author hypothesizes that it was the vagueness of the Belarusian opposition's ideology and workers’ participation in the broader protest movement that helped them overcome the challenges of suppressed voice, bureaucratic despotism, and atomization. These mobilizing factors, however, limit the further development of autonomous labor organizations and their democratizing impact.

Технологии формирования культуры гражданской активности молодежи в деятельности общественных организаций России

The article analyzes the representation of technologies of value influence in the activities of public associations on the formation of civic attitudes of Russian youth. The analysis is based on a hybrid strategy of empirical research, including the all-Russian mass online survey of young people; in-depth interviews with leaders and activists of public associations of the Russian Federation; cognitive mapping of digital communities in the non-government sector; social media analytics using a service for monitoring social media and analyzing social graphs of digital groups of Russian public youth organizations and movements. The author formulates basic conclusions about the potential of the third sector of the Russian Federation in the process of forming a culture of civic engagement of the younger generation. The results of the survey prove that the combination of a significant readiness of Russian youth to transform civic engagement into a format of political activism, a high potential for the effectiveness of technologies of value influence of public associations and trigger events contributing to protest mobilization of the younger generation provides a high probability of the scenario of increasing unconventional activity of Russian youth.

Participatory Governance in Ukraine: A Case Study of Anti-corruption Policy in the Period 2014–2018

The 2013-2014 Euromaidan Revolution, which culminated in the fall of the authoritarian and notoriously corrupt regime of President Victor Yanukovych has become a symbol of the triumph of civic activism in Ukraine. Although those events have attracted significant scholarly attention, the question whether the Ukrainian civil society’s capacity for protest mobilization has successfully been channeled into sustained, formalized and productive forms of civic participation in the process of public policy making has remained largely unaddressed. Therefore, this paper sets out to examine whether civil society organizations (CSOs) have become more integrated into the Ukrainian public policy making process since the Euromaidan and whether the Revolution has led to a meaningful shift towards a more open and inclusive style of governance. Drawing on legal texts, external reports and semi-structured interviews with Kyiv-based anti-corruption activists, the study finds both a clear trend towards increased openness of the policy making process to CSO input in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution as well as the insufficient consolidation and institutionalization of such participatory mechanisms, which ultimately makes them vulnerable to the preferences of individual players and to broader changes in political attitudes.

Violence or nonviolence: the instrumental nature of protest mobilization

Protest mobilization is a complex multidimensional process, the implementation of which depends on a number of factors, both objective and subjective. Regular practices of large-scale demonstrations directed against the activities of state structures in various regions of the world, as well as an unprecedented decrease in the level of violence in the world, actualize issues related to the grounds of protest activity, as well as tools that characterize protest mobilization. In this regard, the subject of the study are the tools of protest political mobilization, and the purpose of the study, in turn, is to determine the boundaries of the use of violence and nonviolence as tools of protest mobilization. В В Based on the principles of the theory of "adversarial politics" by C. Tilly to the analysis of violence and nonviolence in political activity, as well as using the analysis of current data on the practices of protest activity, the authors made a number of conclusions: 1) both violent and nonviolent instruments are rooted in the basis of protest activity, which are mixed within the framework of mass actions in various proportions; 2) violence is an integral part of mass protests, but the magnitude and intensity of violence is determined by the level of political dissatisfaction with the subjects of collective activity and the scale of the available resource base; 3) according to statistics, nonviolent forms of collective protest actions are more successful in realizing the stated goals of the subjects of mobilization.

“Networked” Revolutions? ICTs and Protest Mobilization in Non-Democratic Regimes

Despite the wealth of research linking Internet-based communication technologies (ICTs) with the rise of anti-government demonstrations in non-democracies, empirical evidence on the impact of ICTs on protest remains inconclusive. Using data from the sixth-wave of the World Values Survey (WVS), I test the relationship between ICT use and protest in non-democracies, finding that although Internet use helps to explain protest participation, organizational networks remain crucial for mobilizing protesters, even in the digital age. Notably, I find that active membership in formal organizations (i.e., attending meetings, holding leadership positions, etc.) significantly increases the likelihood of individual protest participation, providing members with the skills necessary for political engagement and connections to a sustained flow of information about protest events. Most important, I find significant interactive effects between organizational membership and ICT use—while Internet use increases the likelihood of protest engagement for all individuals, the effects of ICT use are greatest for multiply-engaged citizens who are actively involved in both online and offline organizational networks. This work thus illuminates a largely overlooked symbiosis between online and offline communities and forces a reconsideration of the ways in which organizations work to mobilize contention under authoritarian rule.

Labor Unions and Non-member Political Protest Mobilization in the United States

While political protest and labor unions are seen as important elements in democratic societies, systematic research on the relationship between the two is scarce. Past research finds that union members are more likely to engage in protest, but it is unclear whether unions increase protest among non-members. This study draws on two waves of data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study and examines two mechanisms through which labor unions facilitate political protest among non-members: social ties and aggregate strength. We provide evidence that labor unions mobilize non-members to engage in political protest. When non-members have a social tie to a union or live in a state where unions are more robust and widespread, they are more likely to engage in political protest, but no more likely to engage in non-collective forms of political participation such as donating to political causes or contacting officials. The findings extend our understanding of an important, but understudied, act of political behavior as well as the ways that societal institutions stimulate collective political mobilization.

Social Policy on Social Media: How Opposition Actors Used Twitter and VKontakte to Oppose the Russian Pension Reform

ABSTRACT How do opposition actors in electoral authoritarian regimes use social media to galvanize support? Based on 2,229 social media posts, I examine how Aleksey Navalny and the Communist Party (KPRF) politicize grievances about the pension reform of 2018 and use Twitter and VKontakte for protest mobilization. I find that Navalny integrates the reform in his narrative of government corruption and theft, strategically using the platforms’ different advantages. The KPRF frames less coherently and makes no distinction between VKontakte and Twitter. These differences, I argue, are mainly due to actors’ different target audiences and their respective position in the authoritarian political system

‘Out With the Bases of Death’: Civil Society and Peace Mobilization in Greece During the 1980s

The peace mobilisation against the Euromissiles in the early 1980s constituted one of the biggest mass movements in contemporary European history. The article aims to examine the completely neglected, albeit impressive peace movement in Greece of the 1980s. What mobilised these activists? How did they frame the notion of peace? What were the political conditions under which the discourse of peace became powerful? What was the role of the state and political parties? How did they protest? The article will use national and local press, transnational and Greek peace campaign material, semistructured interviews and polls to provide rich and unique evidence on the way protesters mobilised in recently democratised Greece. Recent accounts of peace mobilisation have emphasized its pan-European character. While acknowledging the merit of transnational approaches, the archival based project, informed by new social movements theory, aims to contextualise cycles of protest mobilisation and highlight the role of national identity that transcended Cold War narratives.

Everyday Nationalism in Unsettled Times: In Search of Normality during Pandemic

AbstractPandemics and other crisis situations result in unsettled times, or ontologically insecure moments when social and political institutions are in flux. During such crises, the ordinary and unnoticed routines that structure everyday life are thrust into the spotlight as people struggle to maintain or recreate a sense of normalcy. Drawing on a range of cases including China, Russia, the UK, and USA, we examine three categories of everyday practice during the COVID-19 pandemic that respond to disruptions in daily routines and seek a return to national normality: performing national solidarities and exclusions by wearing face masks; consuming the nation in the form of panic buying and conspiracy theories; and enforcing foreign policies through social media and embodiment. This analysis thus breaks with existing works on everyday nationalism and banal nationalism that typically focus on pervasively unnoticed forms of nationalism during settled times, and it challenges approaches to contentious politics that predict protest mobilization for change rather than restoration of the status quo ante. In highlighting the ways that unsettled times disrupt domestic and international structures, this work also presents a first attempt to link everyday nationalism with growing work on international practices.

После Крыма: исчезающий консенсус

Цитирование: Белоусов А.Б. (2020) После Крыма: исчезающий консенсус // Мир России. Т. 29. № 2. С. 195–204. DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2020-29-2-195-204
 Коллективная монография «Выборы на фоне Крыма» вышла в очень удобный для осмысления момент: выборный цикл 2016–2018 годов закончился, а вместе с ним – и патриотический подъем; следующий цикл эпохи транзита начинается на наших глазах. Можно открыть книгу на любой странице и, читая оценки политологов и социологов, время от времени восклицать «сегодня это не так!» или «а ведь совсем недавно так оно и было!», и для этого будут все основания. «Пересушенная» явка в сентябре 2016 года привела к тому, что протестная мобилизация стала концентрироваться на внеэлекторальных площадках, а административная мобилизация все чаще порождала голосование «с фигой в кармане». Попытка ограничить политическую субъектность города с помощью лепестковой нарезки оказалась не способна повлиять на повышенный интерес протестных лидеров к городской проблематике. Крымский консенсус позволил «Единой России» набрать довольно большой процент на выборах в Государственную Думу 2016 года, однако не смог предотвратить делигитимацию партии власти, резко усилившуюся после пенсионной реформы; в дальнейшем провалились попытки замаскировать провластных кандидатов с помощью процедур самовыдвижения. Вместо снижения уровня партийной конкурентности Россия получила на выборах 2019 года первый опыт успешной коалиционной сделки. Помимо этого, зачистка политического пространства породила безлидерский протест, а постоянная мобилизация административного электората начала вымывать из процедуры выборов смысловую составляющую. Монография «Выборы на фоне Крыма» дает прекрасную возможность почувствовать, как время ускоряется прямо на наших глазах, и станет лучшим ответом скептикам, которые полагают, что мы живем в стране, где ничего не меняется. Помимо исторической, у книги «Выборы на фоне Крыма» немало других достоинств: она указывает на точку, с помощью которой намного легче понять, в каком направлении и насколько далеко мы ушли от патриотического подъема 2014 года.

Protesting with the ballot: Diffusion of methods of electoral protest in Spain

This paper shows the pattern of diffusion of a tool of protest – blank and null voting (BNV)– in the context of Spanish national elections. It shows how the 2004 protest mobilization by Batasuna (a Basque nationalist party) predicts null voting by identifying the relationship of this form of protest with both the level of grievance of the population and the political resources of the mobilizers. The paper then demonstrates that this large and visible use of a protest tactic is followed by a heterogeneous diffusion process after the main mobilized protest event and beyond the supporters of the original mobilizer. In the 2008 national election, across Spain, citizens with grievances toward the political system and, most importantly, with political affinity with the initiators were the ones to update their individual protest repertoire with this electoral protest tool.