Parties in the Streets of Europe: A Comparative Assessment

Since the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, European governments adopted unpopular austerity policies together with structural reforms to preempt or tackle the consequences of the economic meltdown. In many of these countries, citizens disapproved of these policies and relied on the protest arena to voice their opposition, which did not go unnoticed by the political parties. The paper focuses on the direct involvement of political parties in protest mobilization and systematically assesses the extent of party-sponsored protests. Our key expectation is that political parties get more involved in protest mobilization in times of crises – especially a ‘crisis of representation’ should lead to increasing efforts of (certain) parties to strengthen their linkages to social movements. Therefore, we expect parties to be the most present in the protest arena in countries hardest hit by the Great Recession (crisis hypothesis). Yet, we believe that in countries where historically parties were more present in the protest arena, they are also more likely to use this channel during the Great Recession (path dependency hypothesis). To explain which parties are likely to sponsor protest events, we mainly focus on their ideological differences (left/right hypothesis). Building on previous work, we expect that, in North-Western Europe and Southern Europe, the left is more present in protests compared to the right. The reason lies in the attitudes of their supporters towards challenging state institutions. In the case of Southern Europe, the legacy of resistance to right-wing dictatorships plays an important role. Similarly, in the case of Eastern Europe, given the legacy of resistance to left-wing dictatorships, we expect the right to mobilize more often in the protest arena. We aim to explain how much these differences are shaped by the ideological composition of the national government and the timing of elections.