The ‘Normalisation’ of the Protester: Changes in Political Action in Italy (1981–2009)

Abstract

Authors claim that political protest is ‘normal’ in contemporary democracies, which are, therefore, ‘social movement societies’. This article analyses the Italian case, showing that there has been an expansion and a gradual institutionalisation of political protest, but it also tests whether there has been a ‘normalisation’ of the protester. It is argued that in a ‘social movement society’ protesters are more heterogeneous than in the past. Using survey data spanning over 30 years we find that the association between several individual characteristics and participation in political protest weakens or disappears. However, complete normalisation of the protester has yet to be completed.

Keywords::

• Normalisation of Protest
• Social Movement Society
• Political Action
• Individual Political Protest
• Italy

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Giulia Dotti Sani, the anonymous reviewers and the South European Society and Politics editors for providing very useful insights on previous versions of this article.

Notes

^1. The dataset collects events from newspapers. In the dataset a ‘protest gathering that generally moves short distances or focuses on a specific target’ is coded as a demonstration, while a ‘group movement from one point to another for a political reason’ is coded as a march (Francisco 2000).

^2. Walgrave and Verhulst (2011) argue that other methods of data collection, such as protest event surveys, are very rare before 1995.

^3. The question wording is the following: ‘I'm going to read out some different forms of political action that people can take, and I'd like you to tell me, for each one, whether you have actually done any of these things, whether you would/might or would not/never, under any circumstances, do it/any of them: signing a petition, joining boycotts, attending peaceful/lawful demonstration, joining unofficial strikes, and occupying buildings or factories.’ As reported by the longitudinal EVS documentation file (2011), the question has the same format in all the four waves of the EVS, so the comparability over time of the indicators measuring individual participation in unconventional forms of political participation is ensured. If any unobservable bias produced by the question format is present, this will be constant over time, thus allowing us to compare the probabilities of participation across a period of almost 30 years. Other surveys include a time frame in questions concerning participation in political action. However, as mentioned in the article, the EVS is the only one that allows one to compare participation in protest politics over almost 30 years.

^4. The literature indicates that the H coefficient must be higher than 0.3 to build a reliable scale. If the coefficient is higher than 0.4 the scale is considered ‘moderate’, while if it is higher than 0.5 the scale is considered ‘strong’.

^5. As MSA is a probabilistic method and an improvement over Guttman scaling we could say that one represents, most likely, an individual who has signed a petition, two an individual who has attended a lawful demonstration, three an individual who has joined in boycotts, four an individual who has occupied a building or a factory and five an individual who has joined unofficial strikes, each of these including the respectivethe previous actions.

^6. I used age at completed education because it is present in all four waves, while educational attainment is not. Income is originally coded in three categories in the EVS.

^7. MSA is also suited for polytomous indicators (Van Schuur 2003).

^8. The indicators are: (1) maintaining order in the nation, (2) giving people more say in important government decisions, (3) fighting rising prices and (4) protecting freedom of speech. Indicators (1) and (3) are ‘materialist’ indicators while (2) and (4) are ‘postmaterialist’.

^9. The imputation was performed on the four waves separately.

^10. Long (1997, pp. 127–131) argues that it is preferable to use predicted probabilities when the interest is in the specific categories of the response variable, rather than focusing on the regression coefficients. It is suggested that one use plots to show the association of the variables with the categories of response variables or the discrete change in the variables, holding the other variables constant.

^11. Predicted probabilities and their differences are estimated using a simulation method based on Bayesian inference (Kerman & Gelman 2007) and are calculated for the means of the variables. I have not shown the confidence intervals of the predicted values in Figure 2(a) and (b) (which are, however, available on request), since I wished to avoid overloading the plot with information. The regression estimates are reported in the Appendix.

^12. It is argued that membership in organisations is strictly dependent on socio-economic status, and in particular on education (Armingeon 2007). However, if the association between participation in protest and membership in organisations is spurious it should disappear when socio-economic status is included in the statistical model.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mario Quaranta

Mario Quaranta holds a PhD in political science from the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane, Florence, and is currently a post-doc researcher in the Department of Political Science at Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali (LUISS) ‘Guido Carli’, Rome. His articles have been published, among others, in journals such as Comparative Sociology, European Political Science Review and International Political Science Review.