Beyond the Ballot Box: Changing Patterns of Political Protest Participation in Germany (1974–2008)

Abstract

This article deals with the development of ‘unconventional’ political participation in Germany between 1974 and 2008. Our aim is to describe empirically the evolution of protest actions across time and differences between east and west. Moreover, we strive to unveil explanatory factors by analysing data from the Political Action Survey (1974/75) and the European Values Study (2008) in regard to lawful demonstrations. For this purpose, we draw on scholarly writing and test the causal effects of socio-demographic, social-structural and attitudinal factors. Our findings show that participation in lawful protest forms is not anymore a minoritarian, exceptional or unconventional act of political claims making, but a normal aspect of political behaviour. Demonstrations do not recruit exclusively a specific constituency with a clear social profile, but rather citizens from different social backgrounds and orientations. Moreover, our data suggest a gradual convergence between East and West Germany.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Christian Lahusen is Professor of Sociology at Siegen University in Germany. His research interests are: political sociology, social movements, social problems and the sociology of Europe and European integration. Related publications are: ‘The Protests of the Unemployed in France, Germany and Sweden (1994–2004)’, Social Movement Studies 11/3 (2012); and ‘Who is Afraid of the (Big Bad) European Union? European Integration and Fears about Job Losses’, in W. Arts and L. Halman (eds), Value Contrasts and Consensus in Present-Day Europe (Boston, MA: Brill; co-authored with J. Grauel and J. Heine).

Lisa Bleckmann is a master student of social sciences and a student assistant at the Research Centre ‘Shaping the future’ at Siegen University in Germany. Her main thematic interests are: social inequality and exclusion and the sociology of Europe.

Notes

1. Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1963).

2. David P. Conradt, ‘Changing German Political Culture', in Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba (eds), The Civic Culture Revisited (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1980), pp.212–72.

3. See, for instance, Max Kaase, ‘Legitimitätskrise in westlichen demokratischen Industriegesellschaften: Mythos oder Realität?’, in Helmut Klages and Peter Kmieciak (eds), Wertwandel und gesellschaftlicher Wandel (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1979), pp.328–50; Alan Marsh, ‘The New Matrix of Political Action', Futures 11/2 (1979), pp.91–103; Kai Arzheimer, Politikverdrossenheit. Bedeutung, Verwendung und empirische Relevanz eines politikwissenschaftlichen Begriffs (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2002), pp.40–58.

4. Due to its popularity, the notion of ‘participatory revolution’ has been widely used; see, for instance, Samuel H. Barnes and Max Kaase (eds), Political Action: Mass Participation in Five Western Democracies (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979); Max Kaase, ‘The Challenge of the “Participatory Revolution” in Pluralist Democracies', International Political Science Review 5/3 (1984), pp.299–318; Max Kaase, ‘Mass Participation', in M.K. Jennings and Jan W. van Deth (eds), Continuities in Political Action: A Longitudinal Study of Political Orientations in Three Western Democracies (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1990), pp.23–64.

5. See, for instance, Russell J. Dalton, ‘Participation in Politics’, in Politics in Germany: The Online Edition available from http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~rdalton/germany/ch6/chap6.htm (last accessed 28 August 2014); Meredith W. Watts, ‘A “Participatory Revolution” among the German “Unification Generation”?', European Political of Political Research 25/2 (1994), pp.187–206.

6. Dieter Fuchs, ‘The Democratic Culture of Unified Germany’, in Pippa Norris (ed.), Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp.123–45; Ross Campbell, ‘Socialist Values and Political Participation: A Barrier to “Inner Unity”?', West European Politics 34/2 (2011), pp.362–83.

7. See, for instance, Karl Rohe and Andreas Dörner, ‘Von der Untertanenkultur zur “Partizipationsrevolution”? Kontinuität und Wandel Politischer Kultur in Deutschland', Politische Bildung. Beiträge zur Wissenschaftlichen Grundlegung und zur Unterrichtspraxis 23/3 (1990), pp.18–33; Oscar W. Gabriel, ‘Politische Einstellungen und politische Kultur', in Oscar W. Gabriel (ed.), Die EG-Staaten im Vergleich: Strukturen, Prozesse, Politikinhalte (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1992), pp.95–131; or Dalton, ‘Participation in Politics’.

8. For example Max Kaase and Alan Marsh, ‘Political Action: A Theoretical Perspective', in Barnes and Kaase (eds), Political Action, p.42; Sidney Verba and Norman Nie, Participation in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p.2.

9. Alan Marsh, ‘Explorations in Unorthodox Political Behaviour: A Scale to Measure “Protest Potential”', European Journal of Political Research 2/2 (1974), pp.107–29; Marsh, ‘The New Matrix of Political Action’; Barnes and Kaase, Political Action; Hans-Martin Uehlinger, Politische Partizipation in der Bundesrepublik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1988), pp.67–134.

10. See, for instance, Jan W. van Deth, ‘A Note on Measuring Political Participation in Comparative Research', Quality and Quantity 20/2–3 (1986) pp.261–72; Henry E. Brady, Sidney Verba and Kay L. Schlozman, ‘Beyond SES: A Resource Model of Political Participation', American Political Science Review 89/2 (1995) pp.271–94; Jan Teorell, Mariano Torcal and José R. Montero, ‘Political Participation: Mapping the Terrain', in Jan W. van Deth, José R. Montero and Anders Westholm (eds), Citizenship and Involvement in European Democracies: A Comparative Analysis (London: Routledge, 2007), pp.334–57.

11. Peter Aelst and Stefaan Walgrave, ‘Who Is That (Wo)man in the Street? From the Normalisation of Protest to the Normalisation of the Protester', European Journal of Political Research 39/4 (2001), pp.461–86; Friedhelm Neidhardt and Dieter Rucht, ‘Protestgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1950–1994: Ereignisse, Themen, Akteure', in Max Kaase and Günther Schmid (eds), Eine lernende Demokratie: 50 Jahre Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Berlin: Ed. Sigma, 1999), pp.129–64; Dieter Rucht, ‘The Structure and Culture of Collective Protest in West Germany since 1950', in David S. Meyer and Sidney G. Tarrow (eds), The Social Movement Society: Contentious Politics for a New Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998), pp.29–57.

12. Dieter Rucht and Roland Roth, ‘Soziale Bewegungen und Protest: Eine theoretische und empirische Bilanz', in Roland Roth and Dieter Rucht (eds), Die sozialen Bewegungen in Deutschland seit 1945: Ein Handbuch (Frankfurt: Campus, 2008), pp.635–68.

13. Max Kaase, ‘Mass Participation'; Oskar Niedermayer, Bürger und Politik: Politische Orientierungen und Verhaltensweisen der Deutschen (VS Verlag für Sozialw, 2005), p.215; Jan van Deth, ‘Politische Partizipation’, in Politische Soziologie. Ein Studienbuch (Wiesbaden: Springen VS, 2009), pp.141–80; Oscar W. Gabriel, ‘Politische Partizipation’, in Jan W. van Deth and Markus Tausendpfund (eds), Politik im Kontext: Ist alle Politik lokale Politik? Individuelle und kontextuelle Determinanten politischer Orientierungen (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2013), pp.381–411.

14. Brady et al., ‘Beyond SES’; Verba and Nie, Participation in America.

15. Max Kaase, ‘Interpersonal Trust, Political Trust and Non-Institutionalised Political Participation in Western Europe', West European Politics 22/3 (1999), pp.1–21; Michael D. Stout, Social Capital and Inequality in Political Participation (Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2008); Jan W. van Deth and William A. Maloney (eds), Civil Society and Activism in Europe: Contextualising Engagement and Political Orientation, Routledge Research in Comparative Politics (New York: Routledge, 2010).

16. Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Ronald Inglehart, ‘Values, Ideology, and Cognitive Mobilization in New Social Movements', in Russell J. Dalton and Manfred Kuechler (eds), Challenging the Political Order: New Social and Political Movements in Western Democracies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp.43–66; Pippa Norris, Democratic Phoenix: Reinventing Political Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Kendall L. Baker, Russell J. Dalton and Kai Hildebrandt, Germany Transformed: Political Culture and the New Politics (Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press, 1981).

17. Dieter Rucht, Modernisierung und neue soziale Bewegungen: Deutschland, Frankreich und USA im Vergleich, Theorie und Gesellschaft 32 (Frankfurt/Main: Campus-Verl., 1994); Sven Reichardt, ‘Große und Sozialliberale Koalition (1966–1974)', in Roth and Rucht (eds), Die sozialen Bewegungen in Deutschland, pp.71–92.

18. Wolfgang Fach, ‘Das Modell Deutschland und seine Krise (1974–1989)', in Roth and Rucht (eds), Die sozialen Bewegungen in Deutschland, pp.93–108; Oscar W. Gabriel, ‘Wertewandel, neue politische Bewegungen und kommunale Selbstverwaltung', in Oscar W. Gabriel and Rüdiger Voigt (eds), Kommunalwissenschaftliche Analysen, 1st edn (Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1994), pp.79–103.

19. Dieter Rucht, Barbara Blattert and Dieter Rink, Soziale Bewegungen auf dem Weg zur Institutionalisierung? Zum Strukturwandel ‘alternativer' Gruppen in beiden Teilen Deutschlands (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag GmbH, 1997); Rucht and Roth, ‘Soziale Bewegungen und Protest’.

20. Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Protest-Inszenierungen: Visuelle Kommunikation und kollektive Identitäten in Protestbewegungen, 1st edn (Wiesbaden: Westdt. Verl., 2002); Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

21. Brady et al., ‘Beyond SES’; Rucht, Modernisierung und neue soziale Bewegungen.

22. Max Kaase and Alan Marsh, ‘Distribution of Political Action', in Barnes and Kaase (eds), Political Action; Uehlinger, Politische Partizipation in der Bundesrepublik, p.171; Kay L. Schlozman, ‘Citizen Participation in America: What Do We Know? Why Do We Care?', in Ira Katznelson and Helen V. Milner (eds), Political Science: State of the Discipline (New York/Washington, DC: W.W. Norton /American Political Science Assn, 2002), pp.433–61.

23. Andreas Hadjar and Rolf Becker, ‘Unkonventionelle Politische Partizipation im Zeitverlauf: Hat die Bildungsexpansion zu einer politischen Mobilisierung beigetragen?', Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 59/3 (2007), pp.410–39.

24. Martin Kronauer, ‘“Social Exclusion” and “Underclass”: New Concepts for the Analysis of Poverty', in Hans-Jürgen Andress (ed.), Empirical Poverty Research in a Comparative Perspective (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp.51–75; Miguel Cainzos and Carmen Voces, ‘Class Inequalities in Political Participation and the “Death of Class” Debate', International Sociology 25/3 (2010), pp.383–418.

25. Frank Parkin, Middle Class Radicalism: The Social Bases of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (New York: F.A. Praeger, 1968); Klaus Eder, The New Politics of Class: Social Movements and Cultural Dynamics in Advanced Societies (London: Sage, 1993); Hanspeter Kriesi, ‘New Social Movements and the New Class in the Netherlands', American Journal of Sociology 94/5 (1989), pp.1078–116.

26. Daniel Oesch, ‘Coming to Grips with a Changing Class Structure: An Analysis of Employment Stratification in Britain, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland', International Sociology 21/2 (2006), pp.263–88; Daniel Oesch and Jorge Rodriguez Menes, ‘Upgrading or Polarization? Occupational Change in Britain, Germany, Spain and Switzerland, 1990–2008', Socio-Economic Review 9/3 (2011), pp.503–31.

27. Van Deth and Maloney, Civil Society and Activism in Europe; Volker Kunz and Oscar W. Gabriel, ‘Social Capital and Political Participation in Germany', Associations: Journal for Social and Legal Theory 8/1 (2004), pp.77–99.

28. Mayer N. Zald and John D. McCarthy (eds), Social Movements in an Organizational Society (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1987); Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency 1930–1970 (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1982); Hanspeter Kriesi, ‘The Organizational Structure of New Social Movements in a Political Context', in Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald (eds), Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.152–84.

29. Inglehart, ‘Values, Ideology, and Cognitive Mobilization’; Gabriel, ‘Politische Einstellungen und politische Kultur’.

30. Max Kaase, ‘Political Ideology, Dissatisfaction and Protest: A Micro Theory of Unconventional Political Behavior', in Klaus von Beyme (ed.), German Political Studies: Volume 2 (London: Sage, 1976), pp.7–28; Fach, ‘Das Modell Deutschland’; Russell J. Dalton, ‘Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies', in Norris (ed.), Critical Citizens, pp.57–77; Russell J. Dalton, ‘Citizenship Norms and the Expansion of Political Participation', Political Studies 56/1 (2008), pp.76–98.

31. Most clearly by Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1997).

32. Marco G. Giugni, ‘Was It Worth the Effort? The Outcomes and Consequences of Social Movements', Annual Review of Sociology 24/1 (1998), pp.371–93; Jennifer Earl, ‘The Cultural Consequences of Social Movements', in David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule and Hanspeter Kriesi (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), pp.508–30.

33. Sidney Verba, Kay Schlozman and Nancy Burns, ‘Unequal at the Starting Line: Creating Participatory Inequalities across Generations and among Groups', American Sociologist 34/1-2 (2003), pp.45–69; Neal Caren, Raj A. Ghoshal and Vanesa Ribas, ‘A Social Movement Generation: Cohort and Period Trends in Protest Attendance and Petition Signing', American Sociological Review 76/1 (2011), pp.125–51; Hadjar and Becker, ‘Unkonventionelle Politische Partizipation’, p.433.

34. Brady et al., ‘Beyond SES’; Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman and Henry E. Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Verba and Nie, Participation in America.

35. Two further variables had been part of the analysis of the socio-economic situation of German citizens: household income and the parents' educational levels. The causal effect was marginal. We excluded them from the models because they generated larger numbers of missing cases.

36. See Oesch, ‘Coming to Grips'; and Oesch and Rodriguez Menes, ‘Upgrading or Polarization?’.

37. The logistic regression analysis in particular was confronted with higher levels of missing cases: the PAS from 1974/75 generated 1868 valid cases (16.7% missing), and the EVS (2008/09) 809 and 735 for West and East Germany (24.5% and 26.8% missing respectively). We opted for listwise deletion for various reasons. First, our analyses suggest that cases are missing at random. This particularly applies to the variable measuring social class affiliation, which generates the biggest share of missing data. The distribution of (missing) cases is largely unrelated to our dependent variable. Second, we used multiple imputation to substitute missing cases, as a measure to assess the robustness of our regression analysis. As expected, the calculated regression coefficients were consistently a bit higher. However, the findings did not alter the overall picture and did not increase significance levels. Only in the PAS database, the importance of ‘educational levels’ was boosted in individual categories, but this was mainly due to the small number of cases in these subgroups, which react in a oversensitive manner to imputation. Hence, our various analyses suggest that the regression models with listwise deleted cases are robust. See also: Paul D. Allison, Missing Data (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002).

38. David P. Conradt, ‘West Germany: A Remade Political Culture? Some Evidence from Survey Archives', Comparative Political Studies 7/2 (1974), pp.222–38.

39. Neidhardt and Rucht, ‘Protestgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland’; Rucht, ‘The Structure and Culture’; Aelst and Walgrave, ‘Who Is That (Wo)man?’.

40. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984); Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, ed. Martha Banta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

41. Aelst and Walgrave, ‘Who Is That (Wo)man?’; Rucht, ‘The Structure and Culture’.

42. Rucht and Roth, ‘Soziale Bewegungen und Protest’.

43. Christian Lahusen and Britta Baumgarten, ‘The Mobilization of the Unemployed in Germany (1998–2004)', in Didier Chabanet and Jean Faniel (eds), The Mobilization of the Unemployed in Europe: From Acquiescence to Protest? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp.57–88.

44. Detlef Pollack, Politischer Protest: Politisch alternative Gruppen in der DDR (Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 2000); Jan Wielgohs, ‘DDR: Regimekritische und politisch-alternative Akteure (1949–1990)', in Roth and Rucht (eds), Die sozialen Bewegungen in Deutschland, pp.109–32; Dieter Rink, ‘Bürgerbewegungen in der DDR: Demokratische Sammlungsbewegungen am Ende des Sozialismus', in Roth and Rucht (eds), Die sozialen Bewegungen in Deutschland, pp.391–416.

45. See, for instance, Rohe and Dörner, ‘Von der Untertanenkultur zur “Partizipationsrevolution”?'; Russell J. Dalton, ‘Citizenship Norms and the Expansion of Political Participation’, Political Studies 56/1  pp.76–98; Dalton, ‘Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies’; Conradt, ‘Changing German Political Culture’.

46. Authors highlighting convergence are, for instance, van Deth, ‘Politische Partizipation’, p.150; Dalton, ‘Participation in Politics’; or Oscar W. Gabriel, ‘Politische Partizipation’, in Jan W. van Deth (ed.), Deutschland in Europa (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2005), pp.317–38. More emphasis of historic legacies and differences are to be found in Fuchs, ‘The Democratic Culture of Unified Germany’; and Campbell, ‘Socialist Values and Political Participation’.

47. See Ronald Inglehart and Gabriela Catterberg, ‘Trends in Political Action: The Developmental Trend and the Post-Honeymoon Decline’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology 43/3–5 (2002), pp.300–16.