Radical Social Movements in Western Europe: A Configurational Analysis

Abstract

There has been little comparative research on the differences across radical social movements in the context of consolidated democracies. This paper analyses the squatting movement, as an exemplary case of contemporary radical movement. This study aims to identify the causal contexts that explain the differences of strengths within these movements across 52 large cities in Western Europe. It examines three main hypotheses drawn from the literature on social movements concerning the characteristics of political systems, the availability of resources and the presence of economic grievances. We use fuzzy sets qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to identify configurations of causal conditions. The findings show that diverse contexts (multi-causation) lead to strong movements. A first causal context combines grievances, resources and closed or unresponsive institutions, and is typically found in Southern European cities. A second context highlights the presence of robust far-right parties in combination with less severe grievances and relative scarcity of resources, and is typically found in Northern European cities. These findings demonstrate that resources and grievances are quasi-necessary conditions for strong radical movements, although polarization can lead to a similar outcome where these characteristics are not present.

Keywords::

• Radical movements
• squatters
• Europe
• radical left
• protest
• grievances
• institutions
• resources

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Rossella Ciccia, Juan Diez Medrano and Mario Diani for valuable insight provided in different stages of this manuscript, and the comments of three anonymous reviewers provided by this journal. Of course, they are not responsible for its contents and the deficiencies that remain. The author also thanks the Department of Sociological Theory of the University of Barcelona (Spain), where he defended his Ph.D. in 2012.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. The logical remainders introduced were those combinations with the presence of ‘fright’, ‘jobless’, ‘owners’, ‘leftcommunity’, and the absence of ‘openness’ and ‘responsiveness’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by research grants from the Alßan Programme of the European Commission [grant number E04D036672CL]; the Spanish Ministry of Education [grant number TME2008-01023]; and the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies.

Notes on contributors

Cesar Guzman-Concha

Cesar Guzman-Concha is a research fellow in the Scuola Normale Superiore and the Center on Social Movement Studies in Florence (Italy). He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Barcelona (2012), in the European PhD in Socioeconomic and Statistical Studies, after receiving a MA in Latin American History and a BA in Sociology from the University of Chile (Santiago). His research interests and publications cover topics in contentious politics, social movements in transregional perspective, radical left parties, and research methods, in particular qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and historical comparative analysis.