Protesting in Italy in Times of Crisis: A Cross-governments Comparison

By triangulating quantitative and qualitative methods, based on protest events and in-depth interviews with protest actors, this article aims at comparing the protest trends in a diachronic perspective, which encompasses the period of the last four Italian governments facing the current economic crisis. The analysis will show that the mobilization against the current economic crisis and the austerity measures undertaken by Italian governments in recent years has been relatively weak in terms of political outcomes. On one hand, the Italian anti-austerity protest field was dominated by old actors, and was not able to produce the strong social and political coalitions that emerged in the previous anti-neoliberal mobilization phase. As a consequence, the mobilization has not, so far, had an impact on the political and party system that could at least create the conditions for challenging the neoliberal, austerity-oriented responses to the economic crisis.