Based on a comparison of six demonstrations surveyed in Italy between 2011 and 2012, three directly promoted by actors, mobilizing on “traditional issues” such as worker’s rights and social justice, and three by “new” actors, protesting on “new” issues (a peace demonstration, a gay pride and a students’ protest), this article analyses variation in protesters’ framing, trust and sense of efficacy. This work, in challenging the traditional distinction between new social movements, focusing on post-material issues, and the old ones, linked to class politics, points to the theoretical discussion of the reciprocal interplay between individuals, organizations and changing contexts. As we will see, all three levels of analysis—the micro, meso and macro—provide useful explanations, but it is their complex, repeated interactions that especially need to be studied in detail, since each compounds and complicates the others. To unpack the web of complex interactions between these levels we aim specifically to answer at three central questions: at the macro level, how much do institutional dimensions count in time of economic crisis? At the mesolevel, how much do old/new social movements count? And at the micro: what are the socio-graphic (generation, education, class) effects?
Where appropriate, most of these results will be also contrasted with mobilizations surveyed in the pre-financial crisis period in previous research such as the Genoa protest in 2001, the European social forums in 2002 and 2006 and the anti-war march in 2003.
Our purpose is to see if the changes occurred at the macro-level, with specific reference to the financial crisis and the austerity policies produce similar effects on the meso and the micro levels, by pushing old and new organizations as well as participants with different backgrounds to react in much the same way.
