The Symbolic and Political Dimensions of Societal Accountability in Grassroots Struggles against Corruption in Southern and Central Europe

The paper draws on social movement studies literature to understand how societal accountability works in fighting corruption from below. Societal accountability implies multi-faceted mechanisms in which both the symbolic and the political dimension play a relevant role in explaining grassroots mobilizations against corruption. In this paper, we consider both these dimensions with the aim to understand how corruption (and anti-corruption) is interpreted beyond institutional politics and how such framing inform mechanisms of societal accountability when grassroots mobilizations against corruption emerge in specific political contexts. To investigate these dimensions we develop our analysis on the basis of two concepts formulated in social movement studies: 1) the political opportunity structure, which allow us to reconstruct the political context in which grassroots opposition to corruption develops and 2) collective action frames, which allow us to reconstruct the discourses around corruption that emerged within grassroots opposition to corruption. We explore the relationship between the political opportunity structure and collective action frames against corruption in four countries – two in Southern Europe (Italy and Spain) and two in Central-Europe (Hungary and Bulgaria) – and through two datasets – a corpus of civil society and social movement documents and semi-structured interviews with activists involved in mobilizations against corruption.