Yellow Vest Movement Research Articles

Under the Smokescreen of Horizontality: Gendered Leading Tasks within the Yellow Vest Movement

There is little scholarship on how gender impacts the construction of leadership in supposedly leaderless, horizontal social movements. In this study, I expand the concept of leading tasks, to get at the ways in which gender intersects with the critical organizing work of maintaining horizontal movements. Drawing on comparative data from 7 months of fieldwork conducted with two grassroots groups in the French Yellow Vest movement, I argue that horizontal organizing in the Yellow Vests (YVM) functions as a gendered structure which opens possibilities for women to take on important leading tasks: caring management, attentive listening, and superintendence. These analytically constructed, gendered leading tasks point to a tension inherent in horizontality: It creates leeway for women’s participation, while also functioning as a smokescreen for a process where group members reproduce traditional gendered expectations of women to do a “third shift” in organizing, characterized by nurturing and caring for participants and activist spaces. The study documents how women can be disadvantaged by this mode of organization. Thus, the concept of gendered leading tasks contributes to investigating how leadership is a gendered construct shaped by those who enact it, and the social structure that surrounds it.

The benefits of elastic fuel taxation

Current fuel taxation in France presents a blind spot, since it does not consider the oil price. This article explores the benefits of a tax rate 'elastic' to the price of a barrel of oil: if international prices soar, the tax rate would be lowered, and vice versa. Such a mechanism has generated limited literature, even though it could be of interest given the strong volatility of oil prices over the two last decades. We analyze the conditions of implementation and the implications of such an elastic tax, first from a theoretical point of view, and then empirically through a retrospective quantification of its effects, if it had been introduced in France from 2010. We conclude that an elastic tax could efficiently lower price peaks at the pump, thus increasing the acceptability of fuel taxes. The impact on public finances can be controlled and would be limited. With such a mechanism, the Yellow Vests movement might have been more limited, as well as the costly measures put in place in reaction to the war in Ukraine. This principle of elasticity in fuel taxation thus deserves the attention of all oil-importing countries, well beyond the French case.

Analysis of the determinants of support and participation in carbon tax riots in France

ABSTRACT This study examines the drivers of support for and participation in the Yellow Vests movement in France, which emerged in response to creating a carbon tax on fuel. Using a representative survey of more than 1,000 respondents in French cities, we find that factors related to social origin and ideology explain support for the movement. However, we also show that satisfaction with public services reduces interest in this movement. This finding underscores the role of public services in shaping the acceptability of policies based on taxes and providing a sense of purpose for ecological taxation. Our study contributes to the literature on the intersection of environmental policies, public services, and social mobilization.

Manifesting the revolutionary people: The Yellow Vest Movement and popular sovereignty

Manifesting the revolutionary people: The Yellow Vest Movement and popular sovereignty

From Streets to Policies: The Impact of Yellow Vests Movement on French Public Policy

From Streets to Policies: The Impact of Yellow Vests Movement on French Public Policy

The Yellow Vests’ Relationship to Revolution and Violence

Abstract The Yellow Vests movement, which started in France in late 2018, was unprecedented in many ways. Its use of social media to bring together individuals from all across the country, its lack of clear leadership, its refusal to work alongside political parties or unions, and its ability to bring together opinions from across the political spectrum set it apart from other periods of political and social unrest in France. Yet commentators and demonstrators alike have drawn comparisons with France's revolutionary past. Could the movement be described as revolutionary? Are the violent acts of the protestors and the violent acts of the police sufficient criteria to categorize the movement as revolutionary? Drawing from government data, reports of the demonstrations, and publications on the Yellow Vests, this article argues that their appropriation of revolutionary imagery and methods suffice to qualify some of their efforts as revolutionary, especially when considering the movement's continued impact on political and social commentary in France.

Absorptive Resisting Work: How the yellow vests deployed resistance to and through violence

Organizational research has increasingly recognized violence as an instrument for achieving compliance and maintaining the existing order. However, resisters tend to be portrayed as powerless in the face of this violence or engaging in hopeless acts of resistance. In comparison, by examining the context of violent protests, this paper discusses how activists can endure and use violence as part of their resistance. I build on a 15-month ethnography of the gilets jaunes (yellow vest) movement to illuminate the absorptive resisting work involved in deploying resistance to and through violence. This absorptive resisting work included reducing the repressive effects of violent protests and embracing those effects to generate symbolic and discursive resources against police violence, as well as including violent protest tactics in ways that regenerated those resources. Ultimately, my findings reveal that this absorptive work allowed resisters to withstand violent protests in the short term and reframe them in the long term. This paper thus contributes to studies on resistance to violence by showing how people can effectively and collectively catalyze violence to challenge it.

Is participatory democracy in line with social protest? Evidence from the French Yellow Vests movement

Is participatory democracy in line with social protest? Evidence from the French Yellow Vests movement

Public preferences for phasing-out fossil fuels in the german building and transport sectors

In most of Europe, the decarbonisation of the building and transport sectors lags behind emission targets. Achieving full decarbonisation requires not only the diffusion of net-zero emission technologies but also the phase-out of technologies that emit greenhouse gases (GHG). However, implementing policy changes in these sectors can have an immediate and significant impact on people’s day-to-day life, leading to a higher risk of political backlash, as exemplified by the yellow vest movement in France. In this study, we investigate public preferences for phase-out policy packages in both sectors in Germany by conducting two conjoint experiments with 1,777 respondents in March 2022. Respondents collectively evaluated a total of 17,770 policy packages per sector, specifically targeting the phase-out of fossil fuel-based heating systems and internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs). We find that respondents favour earlier phase-out dates for both technologies, but the type of preferred instruments varies: while regulatory instruments like bans are preferred for heating systems, economic instruments like taxes are preferred for ICEVs. These preferences are even more pronounced in people most concerned about climate change. In addition, we find that people with higher knowledge about sector emissions tend to demonstrate higher acceptance of policy interventions and that supportive measures significantly enhance the attractiveness of policy packages. Our findings can inform the design of phase-out policy packages, potentially increasing their acceptability and political feasibility.

Does Violent Protest Receive Negative Coverage?—Media Framing of Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Bill Movement and French Yellow Vest Movement

Regarding media framing of protests, current studies have primarily focused on the negative side of framing tools, that is, marginalization devices that news media employ to belittle and demonize a protest. Yet little scholarship has scrutinized the positive side of framing tools, i.e., affirmation devices that mass media adopt to convey sympathy for and approval of a protest. Through comparing U.S. media coverage of two recent large anti-government movements taking place in China and France—the movements sharing similarities in vital factors impacting media coverage—this paper illustrates a series of affirmation devices, including highlighting issues and downplaying violence, blaming violence on authorities, stressing public approval, backing protest goals, and understating a movement’s dark side. A systematic examination of affirmation devices contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of media framing and the relations between the media and social movements. This exploration also challenges the popular conception that violence by protesters typically leads to negative media coverage.

Realising direct democracy through representative democracy: From the Yellow Vests to a libertarian municipalist strategy in Commercy

Among the many criticisms carried by the Yellow Vests movement, criticisms related to representative government as a mode of exercising power occupy a prominent place and find resonance within the broader contemporary crisis of representative democracy. In the face of this crisis, the Yellow Vests movement has put forward many alternative propositions for direct democracy. This contribution focuses on the local experiment of assembly direct democracy that has taken place in the municipality of Commercy, a town in the Meuse region of Eastern France, from the beginning of the Yellow Vests movement to the municipal elections of March 2020. The contribution studies the specific strategy the movement adopted, that of running for elections to give power to the assembly that gathers the town residents. As the movement created a form of direct democracy – the assembly – to mark its opposition to representative democracy, and then used the paradigmatic mechanism of representative democracy – the elections – to give power to the assembly, it enables an understanding of how a movement navigated the dialectical relationship between representative and direct democracy in the framework of a libertarian municipalist electoral strategy and the tensions that have arisen in the process.

Left-Wing or Right-Wing Populism?

Abstract This article reviews the political views of the Yellow Vest Movement (YVM) and explores whether it can best be described as a left-wing populist movement, understood as being primarily inclusionary and focused on socioeconomic issues, or a right-wing populist movement, understood as being primarily exclusionary and attentive to struggles over ethnic identity. This examination will be done by comparing the YVM's political demands to the presidential programs of the Rassemblement National (RN) and La France Insoumise (LFI), which in this article is used as prototypes on right-wing populism and left-wing populism. Since its early beginning in 2018, the YVM has been branded as an avatar of the extreme right. By comparing the claims of the YVM to the programs of the RN and LFI, I argue that this interpretation of the YVM is not substantiated by their actual political demands, which are more aligned with LFI than with the RN.

Ideological crystallization: rethinking the alternative-mainstream binary in times of populist politics

This paper assesses if and how alternative news media manifest their counter-hegemonic potential within the current conjuncture of populist politics in Western liberal democracies. Based on the method of critical discourse analysis, it compares the ways in which the yellow vests movement is discursively (re)constructed by two Flemish legacy newspapers and five alternative news media. Analytically, it engages with an agonistic pluralist perspective. Findings show how both newspapers and alternative media reproduce the same discursive constructions that legitimize the yellow vests’ socio-economic and political grievances. What distinguishes alternative from traditional media is not so much their counter-hegemonic potential but their ideological crystallization, as they reproduce only one discursive construction each. With legacy media now also operating as sites of contestation, this paper makes the importance of the role of political context all the clearer in the assessment of the counter-hegemonic potential of alternative news media.

THE STRENGTH OF PUSHBACK COLLECTIVE IDENTITY IN A FRAGMENTED MASS MOVEMENT*

This article examines how social movement actors can forge and sustain a collective identity despite heterogeneous backgrounds and the absence of pre-existing commonalities and networks. Based on an ethnography of the French yellow vest movement, we build on the concept of reactive identity to describe two key mechanisms. First, we show this movement’s collective identity crystallized through the actors’ shared reactions to the broader sociopolitical environment. Then, we describe how identification processes are reinforced when social movement actors feel rejected, stigmatized, and repressed in their interactions with national institutions, civil society, and individuals. We explain how these mechanisms are useful for understanding the development of collective identities within mass movements, which encompass individuals with various and fragmented identities. Exploring new dimensions of reaction beyond the us-versus-them mechanisms of identity formation, we show how collective identity can coalesce for groups who became stigmatized as they mobilize to oppose their environment.

Dynamical modelling of street protests using the Yellow Vest Movement and Khabarovsk as case studies

Social protests, in particular in the form of street protests, are a frequent phenomenon of modern world often making a significant disruptive effect on the society. Understanding the factors that can affect their duration and intensity is therefore an important problem. In this paper, we consider a mathematical model of protests dynamics describing how the number of protesters change with time. We apply the model to two events such as the Yellow Vest Movement 2018–2019 in France and Khabarovsk protests 2019–2020 in Russia. We show that in both cases our model provides a good description of the protests dynamics. We consider how the model parameters can be estimated by solving the inverse problem based on the available data on protesters number at different time. The analysis of parameter sensitivity then allows for determining which factor(s) may have the strongest effect on the protests dynamics.

Are movements against climate-change policy anti-environmental? Research on the yellow vest movement

Are movements against climate-change policy anti-environmental? Research on the yellow vest movement

Fueling opposition? Yellow vests, urban elites, and fuel taxation

ABSTRACT The yellow vest movement in France was triggered by a fuel tax increase. The increase was designed to reduce petrol consumption and hence emissions. However, the costs of this policy were unequally distributed among citizens. The yellow vests illustrate that abstract support for public action against climate change is not enough to secure support for concrete policies. These policies run the risk of being opposed by citizens when their costs are unevenly spread across society. Through a survey experiment on Norwegian citizens, we analyse how different policy characteristics generate ‘support gaps’ within society. Particularly, we contrast two stylized profiles: ‘urban élites’ (high-educated urbanites) and ‘yellow vests’ (low-educated ruralites). We find that opposition rises with the individual cost of the policy but in a non-linear way. Environmental earmarking and invoking personal responsibility widen the gap between yellow vests, urban élites, and the rest of society. Redistribution to low-income households and invoking international commitments help to bridge such gaps. We argue that, instead of focusing on aggregate levels of support, both policymakers and academics should rather pay attention to the polarizing effects of certain policy attributes.

Understanding the French Yellow Vests movement through the lens of mixed methods: A French touch in social movement studies?

This first special issue on the Yellow Vests movement (YVM) published in English has three objectives. First, we advocate that this puzzling movement proved to be an insightful research field for scholars to make a plea for mixed methods. By so doing, we bridge the usual gaps between positivist and constructivist approaches. Second, after four years of research, this publication is also a first milestone to provide empirical data and analysis of the movement, to better understand its evolution, significance and effects on French society. By combining case studies and national-based comparison, regional face-to-face surveys, national online surveys and in-person surveys, the nine articles provide a clearer and more precise picture of the movement’s composition and its evolution over the months. In addition to a detailed description of the social and political components of the movement, several articles propose to establish bridges between the values and opinions of the Gilets Jaunes or Yellow Vests, the cultural practices of the social groups from which they come, and the modalities of mobilization and form of politicization, inscribed in space and in time. In this way, they provide the debate with valuable keys to understanding the dynamics of the movement. Third, this special issue consequently further analyses how the YVM challenges contemporary social movements studies, the understanding of uprisings and assumptions about contentious politics. The first article introduces the major analytical issues and mixed-method approaches of the 9 articles and their contributions as whole to scholarship on the study of the YVM and social movements in France and from a comparative perspective.

A new form of anti-government resentment? Making sense of mass support for the Yellow-Vest Movement in France

ABSTRACT Anti-elite and anti-political resentment have become a permanent feature of political life in many if not most contemporary democracies, leading to support for populist parties, systematic anti-incumbent voting, and new types of movements, such as the Yellow Vests protests that shook France in 2018–2020. The aim of this paper is to explain the unusual popular support they mobilized. Going beyond the somewhat tautological “populist” label attached to the movement this paper proposes a class-based explanation. Using original data from a survey run after the European Elections of 2019, it shows that social precarity, combined with a lower /working class position, is the main driver of affinity with the YV. The movement is disproportionately supported by the most insecure segments of production workers (mostly men) and service workers (mostly women), giving an identity to those who feel excluded and not represented by mainstream parties and unions. This disaffected “precariat” can be seen as a magnifying glass of the crisis of political representation affecting most Western democracies. A reservoir of discontent that is here to stay and that the economic and political impact of the Covid-19 pandemic could revive.

From uprising to secession: a plea for a localized and processual approach to the avatars of the yellow vest movement

For about fifteen years now, so-called leaderless movements, often stemming from appeals via social networks and having recourse to lasting or episodic occupations of public spaces have flourished. This has had the effect of calling into question the usual toolkit used by social movement scholars to study them. More precisely, it is a question of which levels, dimensions and units of analysis are relevant, especially when it comes to describe movements’ social base and worldviews. In this paper, based on a localized and a long-term collective undertaking, begun from the very beginning of the Yellow Vests movement in November 2018, we discuss those shortcomings and suggest avenues for analysis. We rely on three sets of data in a concomitant manner: life history calendars, social media data (mainly Facebook) and field research (participant observation and biographical interviews). By considering time and place as key variables, we offer an innovative way to describe how the YVs movement has been constructed in a constant flux of change.