Exploring Protest in Europe with a Multi-Level Cross-National Test of the Structural Cognitive Model

Abstract

To explain protest potential, the Structural Cognitive Model (SCM) suggests (i) a multi-level interaction between economic and political contexts (“structure”) and individual-level social psychological factors (“cognitive”) such that (ii) macro-level factors can amplify or dampen individual and group protest potential. This model has few cross-national tests because many of the cognitive concepts it suggests are not available in the major international survey projects. This paper explores the possibilities to test SCM with the European Values Study (33 countries, 2017–2018). I explain protest potential as a result of, at the macro level, economic inequality and the degree to which the Political Opportunity Structure is open or closed. Individual-level factors include economic structural disadvantage and being both politically interested and organizationally embedded. Cognitive factors include external political efficacy and internal social efficacy. I find that external political efficacy is sensitive to the political context and internal social efficacy is not. These results suggest that, to test SCM, the distinction between external political efficacy and internal social efficacy is essential because they have different relationships with the economic and political contexts. Overall, I find that the European Values Study can be used to explore SCM in cross-national perspective.

Keywords:

• Protest
• structural cognitive model
• grievances
• resources
• political opportunity structure

Notes

1 Debates on the causal relations between mass attitudes and the institutional change in the framework of the post (modernization) theory are still undergoing. Conceptually, the extensions of the theory were criticized. The criticism involved the finding of the ecological fallacy between post-materialism and pro-democracy attitudes (Seligson 2002); questioning of post-materialism as a factor, having exogenous effects on democratization (Hadenius and Teorell 2005) ; evaluation of the post-materialism as the main factor for democratization and flourishing of democracies (Dahlum and Knutsen 2015).

2 The age range of this study is 19 to 74.

3 This measure has been employed in previous studies (Corcoran et al. 2011, 2015; Welzel and Inglehart 2008).

4 “World Development Indicators Database. Gini Coefficient,” World Bank, accessed May 23, 2020. Available at http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV. GINI.

5 The intra-class correlation (ICC) coefficient in the null model equals 0.20, which justifies the application of the two-level linear regression model.

6 Correlations between both types of efficacy and protest are low: r = 0.09 for external and r = 0.12 for internal efficacy. Although the efficacy and protest measures are attitudinal, they do not load on a single factor.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was funded in part by the National Science Centre, Poland, in the framework of the grant “Political Voice and Economic Inequality across Nations and Time”. Contract number: UMO- 2016/23/B/HS6/03916.

Notes on contributors

Olga Lavrinenko

Dr. Olga Lavrinenko completed her PhD at the Polish Academy of Sciences in February 2020. She has accepted the new post-doctoral scholar position for the “Political Voice and Economic Inequality across Nations and Time” project based on the Polish Academy of Sciences. Dr. Lavrinenko is working on a series of articles that uses the Structural Cognitive Model to explain cross-national variations in political voice in Europe.