Yellow Vest Movement Research Articles

Shedding light on the yellow vests movement through its spatial dimension, from the gathering places to the origins of the participants

Shedding light on the yellow vests movement through its spatial dimension, from the gathering places to the origins of the participants

From the roundabout to the city center: women’s activist careers and socio-spatial division of activist labor in the Yellow Vest movement

From the roundabout to the city center: women’s activist careers and socio-spatial division of activist labor in the Yellow Vest movement

The digital coverage of the yellow vest movement as protest activity

The digital coverage of the yellow vest movement as protest activity

Becoming political while avoiding politics: a study of Yellow Vests first-timers

The French Yellow Vests movement offers a case study for examining the logics and effects of the avoidance of institutional politics. The movement brought together seasoned activists and a large share of first-time protesters, i.e. social actors with no prior experience in collective action or party politics. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic biographical interviews conducted with the latter, we argue that, paradoxically enough, avoiding politics was a condition of possibility for their entry and continuation in the mobilisation. Moreover, they became political insofar as they acquired a sense of entitlement to speak out publicly as citizens, and a new appetence for current affairs. Even though first-timers’ interest in politics and their forms of knowledge remained very unequal, we urge to study the avoidance of institutional politics as political tactics that might, under certain circumstances, foster politicisation among the most disenfranchised groups.

Geography of contestation: A study on the Yellow Vest movement and the rise of populism in France

AbstractThe rise of a geography of discontent highlighted in recent studies points to a strong association between voting for populist parties and territories with socioeconomic difficulties. While discontent has primarily been addressed through the analysis of populist votes, we provide additional elements of analysis by comparing these populist votes to the Yellow Vest movement, and we distinguish the populist votes coming from the far‐left party from those coming from the far‐right party. Our results show that the Yellow Vest movement cannot be confused with French populist supporters and that their sensitivity to territorial dimensions also differs from that of the latter, especially in terms of access to public services. Their behavior highlights that the geography of protest takes multiple shapes and cannot be reduced to a simple opposition between urban and mostly rural or peripheral areas. This raises serious concerns about the dynamics of territories and the deleterious effects of metropolization and the closure of public services in peri‐urban and rural territories that are not specific to France.

From discreet resistances to Yellow Vests protests in platform capitalism? An ethnographic survey among bicycle delivery workers

ABSTRACT Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Parisian food delivery riders during 2018–2019, this article describes how these gig economy workers appropriate their own work to collectively resist the more restrictive dimensions of digital application control. These forms of resistance are often expressed as the refusal to ‘accept everything’. I show that domination is thus rejected by modelling a sense of labour respectability. These silenced resistances make it possible to recode an otherwise unpleasant job. Furthermore, I highlight how psychotropic substances appear to riders as a means of coping and escaping total capture. In a group composed mostly of men who claim a virile self-image, competition combines with peer solidarity in order to numb suffering while involuntary mystifying exploitation. Finally, I explore resistances against the State and the tax system, by introducing some riders who joined the Yellow Vests movement.

“Liberté, Egalité, Flashball”. Resisting Work to Absorb Violent Protests

This paper explores how protest movements resist police violence, meaning the justified and unjustified use of physical force against citizens, in the context of violent protests. Drawing on an ethnographic study of the French yellow vest movement, I uncover the crucial role of actors resisting work in absorbing violent protests, in the sense of bearing and making their own. My findings show in particular that the articulation of three organized responses, namely physical care, paralegal assistance and violence publicization, enabled the yellow vests to sustain the deployment of violent protest tactics, through property damage, arsons or physical assaults to the police, while questioning the legitimacy of the use of physical force by the police to answer the conflict. This resisting work allowed actors to effectively resist to police violence, by controlling police behaviors and signaling the question as a public issue. Through this study, I first contribute to the literature looking at the efficacy of resistance by theorizing how activists have been able to challenge the use of physical force as part of protest policing. Second, I expand existing knowledge on the work involved in sustaining violence.

When the revolution did not look like you thought it would: the Yellow Vest Movement through radical-left activists’ imaginaries

ABSTRACT The radical left in France has been in decline in France since the 1980s, with union-membership falling and working-class voters moving towards the populist radical right. When the Yellow Vest Movement (YVM) appeared in 2018, it seemed to encapsulate the very demographic that the radical left had lost touch with. However, the YVM did not appear as a straightforward left-wing movement, with unions and radical-left parties branding it as a petty bourgeois tax-protest or as the radical right in disguise. This article is based on interviews with radical-left activists that decided to join the YVM to wage ideological combat within it. Building on a grounded theory approach concerned primarily with culture, I investigate how Marxist social imaginaries shaped the activists’ interpretation of the YVM. In particular, I explore the key concepts ‘vanguardism’, ‘revolutionary spontaneity’ and ‘false consciousness’ to understand the interviewees’ often contradicting rationales and interpretations of the YVM. I find that the radical-left activists got involved in the YVM with the objective of turning it into a left-wing movement, while at the same time appreciating the disorganized, horizontal anti-intellectualism of the YVM.

Framing the Yellow Vests Protests in the French Press

ABSTRACT This study examines how four key French newspapers that vary in their positions and outreach, (Le Monde—central leftist, Le Figaro—central rightist, L‘Humanité—leftist, and La Croix— Catholic) covered the Yellow Vests (YV) movement. Specifically, it examines how the newspapers vary in their use of positive and negative frames, sources, and tone towards the YV protests during a six-month period. Analyses of frames reveal that the most prevalent across all newspapers was the legitimising frame (positive), and the least used was the delegitimising frame (negative). Additionally, Le Monde and Le Figaro shared slightly similar results of negatively framing the events in just more than half of their coverage despite their distinct political leanings. Several differences were also found between L‘Humanité and the remaining publications; while official sources were the most used sources by Le Monde, La Croix, and Le Figaro, L‘Humanité relied mostly on YV sources and presented the most overwhelmingly positive tone toward the YV movement. These results lend support to some perceived public concerns over the critical portrayal of the YV protests and overreliance on official narratives in the French press but show that significant disparities remain in the news coverage among newspapers with different ideological orientations.

INDIGNATION AS AFFECTIVE TRANSFORMATION: AN AFFECT-THEORETICAL APPROACH TO THE BELGIAN YELLOW VEST MOVEMENT

In social movement research, indignation features prominently as an affect that triggers protest and mobilization. Yet, scholarly accounts rarely unpack the precise ways in which indignation performs these roles, and how it transforms individuals who join mobilization. This article conceptualizes indignation as a moment of affective transformation, based on affect-theoretical insights and drawing on the empirical analysis of the Belgian yellow vest movement (BYV). Building on focus groups, participant observations, and interviews, we unpack the complex affectivity of indignation and the dynamics that underlie indignation in the context of protest and mobilization. We find that indignation enables three affective transformations: (1) it acts as a tipping point that follows from individual feelings of resentment; (2) it is a moment of affective resonance that binds individuals in affective communities, (3) it acts as affective bifurcation from the disempowered state of fear and towards the reclaiming of political power.

Mapping public support for climate solutions in France

Although successful sustainability transitions depend on public support, we still know little about citizens’ opinions on climate solutions. Existing research often focuses on the problem perception of climate change rather than analyzing attitudes toward specific climate solutions. Studies also largely use closed questions to assess public opinion, posing a problem of ecological validity. Here, we address these gaps by leveraging data from a large-scale public consultation process, the “Grand Débat National”, launched by the French government in response to the Yellow Vest movement in 2019. Combining structural topic modelling, dictionary-based text analysis and qualitative coding, we map the salience and directionality of public opinion on climate solutions. We find that consultation participants perceive climate change as the most salient environmental problem. Transforming the transport and energy sectors is the most supported solution for addressing climate change. For these two sectors, substitution-based climate solutions - as opposed to sufficiency- or efficiency-based measures - are most salient. For instance, participants stress the need to expand public transport infrastructure and switch to renewable energy technologies for power generation. Our findings demonstrate a strong public consensus on most substitution-based climate solutions, except for the role of cars and nuclear energy. While most participants do not link climate solutions to specific policy instruments, we find preferences for authority-based instruments in the context of phasing out polluting technologies, and treasury-based instruments for supporting innovation and phasing in low carbon technologies.

Yellow Vests, Pessimistic Beliefs, and Carbon Tax Aversion

Using a representative survey, we find that after the Yellow Vests movement, French people would largely reject a tax and dividend policy, i.e., a carbon tax whose revenues are redistributed uniformly to each adult. They overestimate their net monetary losses, wrongly think that the policy is regressive, and do not perceive it as environmentally effective. We show that changing people’s beliefs can substantially increase support. Although significant, the effects of our informational treatments on beliefs are small. Indeed, the respondents that oppose the tax tend to discard positive information about it, which is consistent with distrust, uncertainty, or motivated reasoning. (JEL D83, H23, H31, Q54, Q58)

Leaving the Discursive Definition of Populist Social Movements: The Case of the Yellow Vest Movement

In this article, I analyze whether the case of the Yellow Vest movement fits Paris Aslanidis’ definition of populist social movements, and find that within the discursive theoretical framework Aslanidis adheres to, it does. However, I use the case of the Yellow Vest movement to demonstrate how this discursive approach lacks explanatory potential. I therefore propose moving away from a discursive definition of populist social movements, and advocate for studying political content as a way of detecting common interests shaped by political and societal structures that are shared by participants in a populist social movement. A theory of populist social movements must look at political and economic structures as well as individual agency, framing, and collective identity as a way to explain mobilization. A discursive approach to populism, which only considers language, is therefore not sufficient to explain movements such as the Yellow Vest movement.

A importância das Redes Digitais no engajamento político dos jovens da Universidade do Porto: Reflexão sobre a atividade e presença da política em Portugal

e impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution with the digitization of the world and the internet of things is notorious in the layer of postmodern society. Mobile phones, for example, have changed the way people interact and communicate with others in public space (Abdel-Aziz et al., 2016). These digital tools are often used to keep users informed about events and news, either by broa-dcasting them on public screens or made availa-ble to them over wireless networks anytime and anywhere as shown by Abdel-Aziz (2016). This is especially popular among young people, as shown by Eurostat (2022), in 2021, 95% of young people in the European Union use the internet every day. Digital media also have a profound influence on others in the success of social movements (Kluse-ner, 2018), as seen in movements like #Blackslive-matter or even the Yellow Vests Movement. Now, within this context, we sought to understand how social media platforms can be related to the enga-gement and political presence of young people. For this, we examined the presence of politics in the daily life of this population to be able to induce the weight of this factor in political engagement. Based on data collected from interviews carried out with a sample of 84 university students in Portugal, we analysed their political consumption habits (both in the medium of digital and traditio-nal media) and their opinions on political activism. The impact of the internet and digital media was found not to have a strong relationship with poli-tical engagement, which actually revealed a pre--existing trend: the low participation of young Por-tuguese people in politics, as shown by Accornero e Ramos Pinto (2015). Of those who have some political presence in their daily lives, most are indi-rectly - with the television news in the background - and very few actively seek it. Within this group, digital is the main means of political search.

Unrepresentative Claims: Speaking for Oneself in a Social Movement

Sometimes, people engaged in politics actively refuse to speak for anyone but themselves. These unrepresentative claims multiply in social movements in times of crisis. During the French Yellow Vest movement of 2018–2019, such unrepresentative claims were routinely made by Yellow Vest leaders, to the point of being a condition for having a leadership position in the movement. By making these unrepresentative claims, they declined any representative mandate, asserting their freedom from any instituted influence. However, by claiming to speak only for themselves, they also selected the aspects of their identity they performed. This allowed them to embody the people sharing this identity, recalling the medieval repraesentatio identitatis, but in a way adjusted to today’s greater personalization of politics. Drawing on this movement and on other examples of unrepresentative claims, we can delineate three broad ideal-types of identities that may be put forward by unrepresentative claims: generality, particularity, and individuality.

Bottom-up populism: How relative deprivation and populist attitudes mobilize leaderless anti-government protest

The present research focuses on populism as a bottom-up phenomenon that emerges from shared perceptions of relative deprivation. We predict that by serving as a shared ideological basis, populist attitudes can mobilize leaderless anti-government protest across ideological boundaries. We test this prediction in the context of the French Yellow Vests movement. Using a sample of French citizens (N = 562), we compare the effects of different indicators of relative deprivation on Yellow Vest protest participation and the extent to which populist attitudes account for these relationships. Results indicate that protests were fuelled by indicators of relative deprivation at the individual and group levels. Populist attitudes were best predicted by vertical comparisons between “the people” and “the elite” and fully accounted for the relationship between this type of group relative deprivation and protesting. Conversely, populist attitudes only partially accounted for the relationships between protesting and traditional measures of relative deprivation that either contrast natives with immigrants or individuals with fellow citizens. The findings strengthen the understanding of populism as a “thin centred” belief set that can unite and mobilize those who feel unfairly disadvantaged compared to a socio-political elite.

A discourse analysis of yellow-vest resistance against carbon taxes

Carbon taxation is a core instrument for climate mitigation. Its implementation, however, faces popular resistance. In this paper we study one of the most emblematic mobilizations triggered by the carbon tax issue, the Yellow Vest movement in France. We use Q-methodology, a mixed-method approach to identify discourses (or viewpoints) held by protesters. We find four statistically-distinctive viewpoints, emphasizing respectively: a systemic critique of capitalism; environmental action that is fair; priority over incomes and purchasing power of common people; and inequality and the responsibilities of corporations. Our research points to the importance of ideology in shaping viewpoints and filtering attitudes towards carbon taxes. Yet beyond ideological differences, we find consensus among all discourses, in that there should be more consultation in energy transition policy; the rich and not the poor should pay the cost of transition; and the government should use tax revenue for the transition only. We conclude that, for bold carbon tax schemes to be implemented with less conflict, a much more participatory, transparent and equitable design would be necessary than the one experienced in France.

THE NEW-NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: ARE SOCIAL MEDIA CHANGING THE ONTOLOGY OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS?

Our hypermediated societies affect the very nature of what a social movement is. This article identifies five core nodal points of what constitutes a social movement: Program claims, Identity construction, Connections, Actions, and Resolve (PICAR). Primarily using France’s yellow vest movement case, I assess the impact of social media on these nodal points. I find that social media afford opportunities as well as present challenges for contemporary movements which taken together amounts to a newly emerging ontology. This new-new social movement ontology is characterized by processes of discontinuity (open ideological positioning, fluid collective identities, weak ties, an online repertoire of action, and relative ephemerality) co-existing with continuity (the return of a class politics of redistribution, the continued importance of collective identity, offline repertoires, and cycles of protest). This analysis demonstrates the dynamic interplay between political and mediation opportunity structures, producing new emancipatory potentials and challenging constraints.

Populism and Carbon Tax Justice: The Yellow Vest Movement in France

AbstractScholars cite right-wing authoritarian and business-elite influences in their explanations of populist mobilization against climate reforms. The Yellow Vest movement in France, initially sparked by opposition to a carbon tax, defies the generalizations offered by scholars, the media, and politicians alike. This populist movement emerged from below rather than from elite sponsorship and was motivated by social justice concerns. Through in-depth interviews with 31 Yellow Vest activists as well as supplementary primary texts and data, I uncover how the activists frame carbon taxation and climate change within their political struggle. The findings are four-fold: 1) the Yellow Vests are concerned about global climate change and feel their anti-climate depictions in the media are rooted in a government strategy to divide and discredit the movement; 2) they view the government’s taxing them in order to fight climate change as corrupt and unfair; 3) they argue that the carbon tax is additionally unjust due to their precarity, which has increased over several decades; 4) they want to fight climate change on their own terms and argue for more direct forms of democracy to equalize decision making. I conclude with a framework for understanding how and why popular movements oppose climate reforms.

The yellow vests roundabout revolt, seen through the lens of household budgets

Abstract The ‘yellow vest movement’ that emerged in France in Autumn 2018 raises a serious question for political economy, because many of those who participated did not come from the most fragile sectors of the population. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, but also quantitative data, this article takes an in-depth look at the household budget of one ‘yellow vest’ family. It reveals the increasing tensions lower middle-class peri-urban families are confronted with, and the different ways they address them. In order to understand how they make ends meet, various spheres like the labour and housing market, the transport system, and social mobility must absolutely be interconnected. Contemporary economic reforms impact heavily on these households, lending support to the argument of an ‘attack on household budgets’, particularly as far as road transport is concerned. This approach also allows us to observe the gap between the socio-economic reality of these people and the overly unidimensional statistical indicators available. This budgetary data paves the way for a fair comparison with other contemporary political changes—Brexit for example—to see if similar mechanisms are at work in those cases.