Maria T. Grasso

Protest participation and economic crisis: The conditioning role of political opportunities

The economic crisis that started in 2008 has negatively affected European nations to different degrees. The sudden rise in demonstrations particularly in those countries most hard hit by the crisis suggests that grievance theories, dismissed in favour of resource-based models since the 1970s, might have a role to play in explaining protest behaviour. While most previous studies have tested these theories at the individual or contextual levels, it is likely that mechanisms at both levels are interrelated. To fill this lacuna, this article examines the ways in which individual-level grievances interact with macro-level factors to impact on protest behaviour. In particular, it examines whether the impact of individual subjective feelings of deprivation is conditional on contextual macroeconomic and policy factors. It is found that while individual-level relative deprivation has a direct effect on the propensity to have protested in the last year, this effect is greater under certain macroeconomic and political conditions. Both significant results for the cross-level interactions are interpreted in terms of their role for opening up political opportunities for protest among those who feel they have been most deprived in the current crisis. These findings suggest that the interaction of the contextual and individual levels should continue to be explored in future studies in order to further clarify the mechanisms underlying protest behaviour.

Thatcher’s Children, Blair’s Babies, Political Socialization and Trickle-down Value Change: An Age, Period and Cohort Analysis

To what extent are new generations ‘Thatcherite’? Using British Social Attitudes data for 1985–2012 and applying age-period-cohort analysis and generalized additive models, this article investigates whether Thatcher’s Children hold more right-authoritarian political values compared to other political generations. The study further examines the extent to which the generation that came of age under New Labour – Blair’s Babies – shares these values. The findings for generation effects indicate that the later political generation is even more right-authoritarian, including with respect to attitudes to redistribution, welfare and crime. This view is supported by evidence of cohort effects. These results show that the legacy of Thatcherism for left-right and libertarian-authoritarian values is its long-term shaping of public opinion through political socialization.

Unemployment and attitudes to work: Asking the "right" question

Attitudes research has repeatedly demonstrated that the vast majority of unemployed people want a job and that their employment commitment is generally at least as strong as employed people’s. However, until now it has not asked if they are more likely than employed people to prefer unemployment to an unattractive job. While this oversight reflects a noted widespread reluctance to respond directly to right-wing authors’ assertions, this article argues that it is partly attributable to existing studies using survey questions inappropriate for researching unemployment. Responses to the British Cohort Study/National Child Development Study agree/disagree statement ‘having almost any job is better than being unemployed’ were analysed. Being ‘unemployed and seeking work’ associated strongly with disagreeing with the statement across all recent datasets in both studies, even when a number of relevant variables were controlled for.

The Differential Impact of Education on Young People’s Political Activism: Comparing Italy and the United Kingdom

Abstract It is a common theme in the literature on voter turnout that advanced Western democracies have entered a period of political disengagement and that it is young people, in particular, that participate less. In this paper, I analyse data from the three waves of the European Social Survey and show that while young people are in general less likely to be politically involved than their elders, these differences are greater in the United Kingdom than in Italy. In addition, I show that controlling for education accounts for differences in political participation between young and older people in Italy. However, education does not appear to mediate youth political involvement in the United Kingdom so that normative concerns about youth political disengagement appear to be more appropriate for the latter of the two countries.

Do issues matter? Anti-austerity protests’ composition, values, and action repertoires compared

An important wave of anti-austerity protests has swept across Western Europe in recent years. We can thus distinguish between three different types of protest occurring in Western Europe recently: “old” issue protests, relating to the trade union and labor movement; “new” issue protests, relating to culture and identity issues; anti-austerity protests, emerging directly in reaction to austerity measures and cuts enacted in the current period. Following previous literature, we hypothesize that anti-austerity protests have attracted a new constituency to the streets and that they will be different from both “old” and “new” protests in terms of their social composition, value orientations, and action repertoires. We expect anti-austerity protesters to be on the whole younger, and in more precarious working conditions, to be more concerned with economic over social issues, but also to be considerably less institutionalized and embedded in organizational networks, and to have fewer experiences of previous extra-institutional participation. We test these hypotheses by analyzing a unique and novel dataset containing data from over 10,000 protestors from 72 demonstrations (2009–2013). Our results lend broad support to our hypotheses with the exception of the idea that “precarity” forms a new social base for anti-austerity protests.

The biographical impact of participation in social movement activities: beyond highly committed New Left activism

Studying the outcomes of social movements is important if we want to elucidate the role of collective action in society. While most works have addressed aggregate-level political outcomes such as changes in laws or new policies, a relatively small but substantial body of literature deals with the personal and biographical consequences of social movements at the micro-level, that is, effects on the life-course of individuals who have participated in movement activities, due at least in part to involvement in those activities (see Giugni 2004 for a review). In general, these studies converge in suggesting that activism has a strong effect both on the political and personal lives of the subjects. Most of the existing studies, however, share a number of features that limit the scope of their findings. First, they focus on a specific kind of movement participants, namely movement activists, most often New Left activists, who are strongly committed to the cause. Yet, as suggested by McAdam (1999a), not more than between 2% and 4% of the American population took part in New Left activism of the 1960s. As a result, we cannot directly generalize from these findings to the biographical impact of participation in social movements by less strongly committed people who, in addition, might belong to other ideological areas, not necessarily to the New Left. Second, they use only a limited number of subjects and often do not analyze non-activists. The possibility of generalizing the findings is therefore very limited due to the small samples used and the lack of a control group of non-activists. Third, they look at a specific geographical and area and historical period, namely the United States (or often even more circumscribed geographical areas) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As such, we do not know from these studies how movement participation may affect the lives of people more generally. Thus, overall, in spite of the crucial insights that these works provided, they have little to say about the effects of more “routine” forms of participation. In this chapter we try to go beyond the traditional focus on highly committed New Left activism to investigate the impact of protest participation on political life-course patterns amongst the general population. Our main research question is the following: Does participation in social movement activities, such as participation in protest activities, have an enduring impact on the subsequent political life of individuals?

Young People’s Political Participation in Europe in Times of Crisis

Young people today are often seen as disaffected and indifferent towards politics and the political process. This chapter presents comparative evidence on young people’s political participation during the economic crisis based on survey data from across Europe collected in 2015 to analyse patterns of youth participation. Results presented show that while young people are less engaged than older citizens via conventional means, they are engaged in politics through more confrontational modes of unconventional politics and online activism. While the more confrontational modes of politics tend to only be practiced by small proportions of presumably committed young people, online ‘clicktivism’ is more widespread, so youth regeneration of politics is likely to come through social media and other forms of technological advances for the practice of political engagement.

Citizens and the Crisis: Perceptions, Experiences, and Responses to the Great Recession in Nine Democracies

We discuss a number of issues relating to how the crisis impacts on the citizenry. More specifically, we discuss three main issues which are the focus of the three parts of the book. The first two parts deal with the ways in which citizens reacted to the crisis in two distinct political arenas, namely, the institutional arena and the extra-institutional arena, while the third part examines variations in the ways the crisis was perceived and experienced by different sectors of the population. In addition, after a brief presentation of the empirical basis of the volume, we provide a comparative overview of key indicators of perceptions, experiences, and responses to the economic crisis across the nine countries covered by the book.

Citizens and the Crisis: The Great Recession as Constraint and Opportunity

We discuss a number of issues addressed in the volume. In particular, after an introduction about the capacity for resilience shown by European citizens, we summarize the volume’s content in terms of the economic crisis posing constraints for citizens, but also as opening up opportunities for change. Additionally, we discuss the intertwining of the economic and the political dimensions, which we see as one of the main lessons to be drawn from the analyses presented in the previous chapters. Finally, we suggest a number of avenues for further research on the impact of economic crises on citizens.

Solidarity in Europe: A Comparative Assessment and Discussion

The concluding chapter paints a comparative picture of civic solidarity within and across European member states. For this purpose, we describe the main findings from our survey by presenting and highlighting the various levels of solidarity-driven practices and attitudes in comparative terms. Additionally, we identify the importance of European solidarity when compared to national or global solidarities in Europe. Finally, the chapter assembles the knowledge presented by the various national chapters, showing that solidarity—and European solidarity in particular—is driven by similar forces in the various countries under analysis. Overall, the chapter suggests that the idea of social citizenship becomes key for the development of European solidarity.