Action Repertoires in Times of Crises: A Comparison of Eastern, Northwestern, and Southern Europe

The Great Recession triggered both economic and political grievances, which resulted in growing political conflict on the streets of Europe. However, in spite of high media and scholarly attention dedicated to large-scale events, e.g the Indignados and the Occupy movement, we lack knowledge on whether protest waves took place across European countries and regions. In this paper, we analyze protest waves in six European countries using a cross-regional perspective. We study not only the ups and downs of protest, i.e. the quantitative expansion of protest, but also the qualitative transformations at play. These take the form of innovation in the action repertoire, new actors joining the protest scene, and political violence at the end of the political wave. We use a data set of more than 12,000 protest events, which was collected in a semi-automated manner based on international news wires. Yet, our study shows that protest waves only hit Southern Europe and even in this region not all countries faced a protest wave. Protest waves are singular political events that only take place when multiple types of grievances skyrocket.