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Abstract
In this article, participants in two demonstrations are compared. The demonstrations took place in two different squares in Amsterdam, on the same day, opposing the same governmental policy. Everything was the same except the organizers and their appeals: labor unions with an appeal in terms of threatened interests, on the one hand, and an anti-neoliberalism alliance with an appeal in terms of violated principles on the other. We hypothesize that social cleavages shape mobilizing structures and mobilization potentials. Thereby, this study takes an important yet rarely tested assumption in social movement literature seriously: namely, that grievances are socially constructed. If indeed grievances are socially constructed, one would expect that organizers rooted in different cleavages issue different appeals that resonate with different motives. What made individuals who were protesting the same governmental policy participate in one square rather than in the other? Organizational embeddedness, identification, and appeals that resonate with people's grievances provide the answer to that question. To test our hypotheses, we conducted surveys at both demonstrations; survey questionnaires were randomly distributed. The findings supported our assumptions regarding the influence of the diverging mobilizing contexts on the dynamics of protest participation and revealed the crucial role of identity processes.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor, Graeme Hayes, for their excellent comments.
Notes
1. TtT was an anti-neoliberalism alliance founded by organizations that were involved in the anti-globalization movement. At the time of the mobilization, it consisted of 550 political and civil organizations.
2. Traditionally, the social basis of the labor movement is mostly comprised of craft and production workers with relatively low educational levels (Eggert & Giugni, Citation2012).
3. Mediation and moderation approaches are both tests to increase our understanding of the psychological processes by which independent variables affect dependent variables. Moderation approaches test psychological mechanisms, while mediation is typically the standard for testing theories regarding process (Rucker, Preacher, Tormala, & Petty, Citation2011). Translated to our model, how identification as a mechanism makes unionists or TtT-ers more determined (identification as mechanism and thus moderation), and what process raises unionists or TtT-ers anger (the process whereby unionists perceive their interests and TtT-ers their principles to be violated, the process of violation and thus mediation).
4. We employed a median split to construct two identity groups; ‘strong identifiers’ rank ‘5 or higher’ on our seven-point scale, ‘weak identifiers’ rank ‘lower than five.’
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jacquelien van Stekelenburg
Jacquelien van Stekelenburg is Associate Professor at the Sociology Department of the VU-University, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She studies the social psychological dynamics of protest participation, with a special interest in group identification, emotions and ideologies as motivators for collective action. She co-authored (with Klandermans and van der Toorn) ‘Embeddedness and Grievances: Collective Action Participation Among Immigrants’ (In American Sociological Review, 2008. She edited (with Roggeband and Klandermans) The Future of Social Movement Research: Dynamics, Mechanisms and Processes (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). She is currently conducting an international comparative study on street demonstrations with Bert Klandermans (VU University, Amsterdam) and Stefaan Walgrave (Antwerpen University) funded by the European Science Foundation entitled Caught in the act of protest: Contextualized Contestation and a study on emerging networks and feelings of belonging funded by the Dutch Royal Academy of Science entitled The evolution of collective action in emerging neighbourhoods.
Bert Klandermans
Bert Klandermans is Professor in Applied Social Psychology at the VU-University, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He has published extensively on the social psychology of political protest and social movement participation. His Social Psychology of Protest appeared with Blackwell in 1997. He is the editor and co-author (with Suzanne Staggenborg) of Methods of Social Movement Research (University of Minnesota Press, 2002) and (with Nonna Mayer) of Extreme Right Activists in Europe (Routledge, 2006). With Conny Roggeband he edited the Handbook of Social movements across disciplines (Springer, 2007). He is the editor of Social Movements, Protest, and Contention, the prestigious book series of the University of Minnesota Press and of Sociopedia.isa a new online database of review articles published by Sage in collaboration with the International Sociological Association. He is co-editor of Blackwell/Wiley's Encyclopedia of Social Movements and of The Future of Social Movement Research (University of Minnesota Press).