Peter Gourevitch’s excellent Politics in Hard Times (1986) has helped us to focus on the ways in which basic political coalitions can change as a result of major economic crises. His focus was primarily on elites and their outlooks on economic policies. The shapes of social protest movements and their politics are also deeply shaped by such crises, often depending on the channels of mediation available to them politically at the time. While there is huge scholarship on social movements and crises, there is much less on these channels of mediation – the connections or absence thereof between movements and “conventional politics.” This paper will compare and contrast crisis-spawned social protest after 1929 and 2008 in the EU and the US in order to reflect on changes in these channels of mediation and what these changes may tell us about the evolution of different democracies.
