The Policy Consequences of Alternative Participation: Civil Society Events and Public Expenditure

The question regarding movements’ influence on policy has been faced with a great deal of debate across social science disciplines, with authors stressing in turn the importance of either movement characteristics, or of contextual characteristics. While sociologists have usually focused on mobilization, political scientists have stressed the importance of party politics and public opinion. Taking into account insights from both, this paper studies the impact of alternative participation on policy outputs by looking at a wider array of factors influencing this relationship, by extending the geographical scope of previous analyses, and by focusing on observing effects over time. Finally, the Paper also looks into the differences in analyzing just protest events, the norm in the literature, versus a wider range of civil society events. For these purposes, GDELT data on civil society events is used to analyze effects on public expenditure in 26 European countries between 2002 and 2013 for two issue areas, environment and education. A wide array of hypotheses is included and tested in an integrated model. Information-and-mobilization hypotheses are tested using the yearly number of events, their conflictual nature, and media coverage. Political context and opportunities hypotheses are considered by using effective number of parties and GDP. Finally, political mediation, public opinion, and media framing hypotheses are included using supportive manifestos of parliamentary parties, public opinion support, and media tone of events. The analyses look at the time-variant effects of these indicators by using fixed-effects regression models with panel-corrected standard errors. The results for both issue areas show that when controlling for country differences and looking only at effects over time, civil society events become a significant predictor of public expenditure. The results for using just protest events mirror closely those for civil society events, except when dealing with cases where instances of such events are few.