Keeping a roof over your head: housing and anti-debt movements in Croatia and Serbia during the Great Recession

ABSTRACT

We establish features of political opportunity structures of Croatia and Serbia as parameters that help explain the strategies pursued by housing and anti-debt social movements in the two countries. Relying on the protest event analysis data for 2007–2017, we identify peaks in protest mobilisations and levels of disruptiveness. Furthermore, we analyse the actors' strategy of electoral contestation and compare it across cases. In Croatia, movement actors organised into political parties, while in Serbia, the electoral turn has remained fringe. We argue that this divergence can be explained by different levels of institutional openness to new challengers.

KEYWORDS:

• Political economy of post-socialism
• social movements
• political opportunity structure
• anti-eviction protest
• housing crisis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 In Serbia, the housing price to income ratio rose from 9.8 in 1990 to 22.8 in 1994 (Petrović 2001). In 2006, an average-income household in Serbia required 22 yearly incomes to buy a 65m² apartment (United Nations 2006, 20).

2 In Croatia, average GDP growth for 2009–2010 was −3.7%. Industrial production fell by 9.2% between 2008 and 2009, while unemployment rose from 8.4% to 11.8% between 2008 and 2010 (Bartlett and Prica 2011). Serbia also experienced negative GDP growth (average −0.8 for 2009–2010), as well as a rapid decline in industrial production of 12.1% between 2008 and 2009, coupled with a sharp increase in unemployment rates from 14% in 2008 to 19.2% in 2010 (Bartlett and Prica 2011).

3 According to some news reports, the expenses can reach approximately 50,000 EUR (cf. Latas, February 21, 2020).

4 The full dataset contains four countries: alongside Croatia and Serbia, it also covers Portugal and Spain for the same length of time, between January 1, 2000, until December 31, 2017.

5 Available upon request.

6 Descriptions of events captured in our dataset are detailed, and the distortions and biases that exist in describing events are mainly due to the character of media reporting. Furthermore, our event database stores all source news items that were coded, enabling easy retrieval of original sources for recoding, or to undertake various other types of analyses.

7 Nota bene, they officially registered in April 2017 as a national minority party, which allowed them to avoid the high financial and organizational threshold for party registration. To establish a party of national minority it is sufficient to verify 1000 signatures.

Additional information

Funding

Research project Disobedient Democracy: A Comparative Analysis of Contentious Politics in European Semi-periphery is funded by Swiss National Science Foundation, within the PROMYS programme [grant number IZ11Z0_166540].

Notes on contributors

Danijela Dolenec

Danijela Dolenec is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Zagreb and the principal investigator on the project Disobedient Democracy, www.disdem.org.

Karlo Kralj

Karlo Kralj is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the Scuola Normale Superiore, and a member of the Centre on Social Movement Studies.

Ana Balković

Ana Balković is a PhD student in the doctoral program “Politics, policies and International Relations” at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Research Associate at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Zagreb.