Challenges from left and right: the long-term dynamics of protest and electoral politics in Western Europe

ABSTRACT

The paper looks at how protest politics has developed in Western Europe since the 1970s and how these developments are related to changes in electoral politics. We take up arguments on the two-fold restructuration of political conflict and its different impact on protest and electoral politics. Most importantly, we highlight that the second wave of political change sweeping across Western Europe since the 1990s with increasing conflicts over immigration and European integration left different marks on protest politics as compared to electoral politics. We argue that this difference reflects the driving forces of change and their preferences for specific political arenas, as the momentum shifted from the libertarian left to the populist radical right. More specifically, the results indicate that challengers from the left and challengers from the right follow different logics when it comes to the interplay of protest and electoral mobilization. Empirically, we rely on two large-scale protest event datasets as well as on data on electoral results and campaigns from the 1970s to 2015.

KEYWORDS:

• Protest politics
• electoral politics
• social movements
• Western Europe
• protest event analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The label new overemphasizes certain features of these movements as compared to other social movements, especially the labor movement (e.g. differences in individual motivations, organizational structure, and action repertoires). For example, Tarrow (1989) argues that many authors who emphasize the ‘newness’ of the movements interpret an early phase of movement development as a new historical stage of collective action. Relatedly, Calhoun (1993) shows that many of the ‘new’ features could also be observed for movements of the early nineteenth century. Nonetheless, we adhere in this paper to the label, because it remains widely used to designate the specific movement family that was responsible for a protest wave in Western Europe during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Also, focusing on the goals of protest mobilization, we observe a shift in issue emphasis which left its traces on the overall structuration of political conflict as emphasized in this contribution.

2 On the link between economic and cultural preferences in public opinion, see Häusermann and Kriesi (2015).

3 Following the main line of argument in the political process approach, the two arguments focus on explaining the development and differing shape of social movement activities over time and across contexts. Therefore, our conceptualization of the protest-election link in this paper follows a certain directional path from activities in electoral to protest politics, while not denying that protest mobilization can also trigger changes in electoral politics. However, following the political process approach, setting such a dynamic sequence in motion is more likely under certain conditions that are external to social movements. This differs to accounts that put the emphasis on (a) interactions between specific movements and parties and (b) conceptualize the relations rather from social movements to political parties, which are seen as ‘conveying belts’ of movement messages (e.g. Korpi 1983).

4 The sources are Die Presse (Austria), The Guardian (Britain), Le Monde (France), Frankfurter Rundschau (Germany), NRC Handelsblad (Netherlands), and Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland).

5 In previous work, we have only presented the data up to 2005 (see Hutter 2014a).

6 Where numbers of participants are missing, they have been replaced by the national median of the number of participants for a given type of event (e.g. a demonstration) in that country.

7 For the purposes of this indicator, we rely on the party classification in the ParlGov data set, with minor exceptions. We classify the following two parties as part of the PRR family: Party for Freedom (NL), Swiss People’s Party (CH; after its transformation in the late 1980s).

8 As stated before, the PEA-6 data have been updated for the years 2006–2011 for all countries except France. Appendix A4 shows the Figures 1 and 2 excluding France for the whole period. Note that the general interpretations are not affected by this decision. The main difference refers to the fact that the peaks in the early 1980s get even more pronounced if we exclude France.

9 The overall patterns are very similar if we consider a larger set of 20 Western European countries (Austria, Belgium, Britain, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland). However, the main difference is the later and less pronounced increase in the vote share of the PRR parties. For the PRR, the early rise in the late 1980s and the higher overall level across the six countries shown in Figure 3 is very much driven by the programmatic transformation and strength of the conservative-liberal Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) and the agrarian Swiss People’s Party (SVP).

10 Results available from the authors.

11 Results available from the authors.

12 The trend is partly triggered by more economic protests in Belgium and Ireland, both harder hit by the economic crisis than most other countries in NWE which recovered quickly after the initial ‘shock period’ in 2009–2010.

13 We cross-checked the results by including in the measure, the vote shares of those Social Democratic parties that adopted essentially the same positions on the new ‘cultural’ issues as the Green parties (we based the classification on the positions included in the ParlGov data set). The conclusions are not affected by this decision.

14 The Southern European countries deviate most from the expectation with rather weak PRR parties but with relatively ‘leftist’ protests over cultural issues. In turn, the correlation coefficient increases somewhat once we exclude them from the calculation (Pearson’s R = −0.44).

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge funding by the ERC project ‘Political Conflict in Europe in the Shadow of the Great Recession’ (POLCON) [Project id: 338875].

Notes on contributors

Swen Hutter

Swen Hutter is post-doctoral research fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

Endre Borbáth

Endre Borbáth is doctoral researcher at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.