Dynamics of Cultural Protest from the New Left and the New Right

Research on social movements in Western Europe suggests that the left dominates the protest arena. While this pattern is less clear for Central-Eastern Europe, in recent decades we also see an increase in culturally conservative protest movements in Western European countries, especially since the onset of the refugee crisis. Simultaneously, the strengthening of populist and radical right parties has also increased the organizational resources of the right in both regions. Hence, the protest arena is no longer a realm of the new left. Thus far, we lack an understanding of the protest mobilisation strategies of the new right. Our study asks whether the salience of new cultural issues has led the right to embrace protest as a political tactic. We compare the differences in mobilisation strategies between the left and the right and study the polarizing effects of protest along the cultural dimension of political conflict. Drawing on a novel dataset covering over 30.000 protest events in 30 European countries from 2000 to 2015 and the issues and actors involved in each protest event, we first analyse how the salience of culturally liberal and culturally conservative issues in the protest arena varies across countries and across different government compositions. Accounting for the variance in the scale of protest events, we analyse the dynamics of participation in new left protest and new right protest and the interaction between ideologically different protest movements. We explore whether the polarization of protest is a function of a) how cohesive the government and how polarized the party system is and of b) campaign efforts around elections. Hence, we investigate the linkage between the trajectory of left and right ideologies in the protest and the electoral arena. Our findings show that polarization and conflict in the electoral arena to a considerable degree reflected in the protest arena.