Fields of contention as a prism: toward a nuanced role of parties and civil society actors in protest interactions

ABSTRACT

By adopting a theory-oriented case study approach, this article complements recent debates in political sociology on movement-party interactions, parties and protest, and ‘movement parties’ by proposing a relational perspective to the study of fields of contention. We explore how organizational type, as a political party or civil society organization, and political orientation on the left-to-right spectrum affect actors’ roles in local fields of contention. We draw from network analyses conducted on an original qualitatively coded data set of co- and countermobilization. Our analysis corroborates findings that political parties are indeed highly engaged in protest activity. Yet, our relational approach reveals a more nuanced differentiation of the role of (movement) parties and the interaction of political orientation and actor type.

KEYWORDS:

• Protest interaction
• movement parties
• network analysis
• migration
• local level
• fields

Acknowledgements

Matthias Hoffmann and Elias Steinhilper contributed equally to this research. We want to thank Marieluise Mühe and Catharina Bruder for their help with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2022.2158074

Notes

1. We adopt an organizational definition of ‘civil society’ comprising all voluntary associations (both formal and informal) operating non-profit, independently from their political orientation (Bob, 2011).

2. For details see (Steinhilper & Sommer, 2022).

3. The list is based on a ‘protest event analysis’ (PEA) (Hutter, 2014) conducted for the same period in both cities (Steinhilper & Sommer, 2022), which covered all protests (and hence protest actors) reported in leading local newspapers.

4. Actors, which neither qualify as CSO nor party (e.g. schools) have been coded as a residual ‘other’ category.

5. For the classification of political parties, we predominantly refer to the 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) left-to-right index (lrgen) as a widely acknowledged standard for the assessment of party positions in Europe (Polk et al., 2017). For CSO, we applied a corresponding qualitative approach explained in more details in the online supplement.

6. We have opted for an anonymized representation of collective actors following ethical considerations: We want to ensure individual’s safety and anonymity, as the small-scale settings make individual representatives of organizations easily identifiable.

7. The remaining actors could not be included in the analysis, as they either had no accounts on the relevant platforms, no posts in the relevant timeframe, or were banned.

8. See online supplement for details on the coding-process and intercoder-reliability.

9. Note that only the counter-mobilization network can be interpreted as directed, having a clear sender-recipient relationship, whereas we lack this information for other ties in our data. For example, in many documents, an actor A reports on a protest event organized together with two other actors B, and C, against a fourth one, D. In this case, we can infer the direction of negative mobilization ties of A, B, and C against D. However, oftentimes we lack the information who organized and who ‘merely’ supported the counter-protest event. The joint supportive mobilization ties connecting A, B, and C must thus be interpreted as undirected.

10. A measure for the fraction of ties across groups of nodes vis-a-vis ties within groups, ranging from −1 (full homophily) to 1 (full heterophily).

11. Reciprocity in directed networks is the fraction of ties in one direction that also exist in the other direction.

Additional information

Funding

German Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF), grant 16DII125; Volkswagen Stiftung, grant 98144; German Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend, grant ‘DeZIM’

Notes on contributors

Matthias Hoffmann

Matthias Hoffmann is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen and an associate researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society.

Elias Steinhilper

Elias Steinhilper is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Consensus and Conflict, German Center for Integration and Migration Research.

Katharina Bauer

Katharina Bauer is a research assistant at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society