The Role of Parties in the Austrian Protest Arena, 1998–2016

Parties are the central political actors in the electoral arena. Their role in the protest arena, by contrast, is less well understood. While historical accounts often refer to parties’ extra-parliamentary roots, research on their role in contemporary protests is rare. This lack of research might be the consequence of Kitschelt’s differentiation hypothesis which argues that parties concentrate on the electoral arena only. The proposed paper analyses the role of parties in 21st century protests and studies differences based on ideology and government status. The Austrian case is especially interesting as this country is a stronghold of both “new” party families whose role in protests many researchers see differently: Green and other left or left-libertarian parties are always seen as close partners of social movements. The populist radical right, by contrast, focuses on institutionalized politics when it is strong in the electoral arena, many authors argue. Covering the 1998–2016 period additionally allows for assessing the impact of government status as two parties (SPÖ and FPÖ) changed their role between government and opposition. The paper is based on a quantitative manual content analysis (protest event analysis) using reports by the national news agency APA. Besides basic information such as the date, location, length, and form of protests, the coding scheme is especially fine-grained with respect to actors and issues. As regards the collective and individual actors it distinguishes organizers, supporters, and opponents of particular events as well as the targets. The issues are coded using a scheme developed by the Austrian National Election Study which enables a direct comparison with the electoral arena (e.g. party manifestos). Preliminary results indicate a strong influence of government status as well as a gradual entry of the populist radical right FPÖ into the protest arena.