Crowd-Cleavage Alignment: Do Protest-Issues and Protesters’ Cleavage Position Align?

Proposed for panel 6: Labour, Social Classes and Inequality Every street demonstration attracts its own crowd. Sometimes you even feel you can predict the issue of the demonstration by the looks of it. We argue that this is the case since crowds and issues do align. The basic idea is that sharing a structural position in society aligns fears, hopes and dreams. The structural groups develop shared attitudinal frames around collective demands. When these collective demands politicize and the groups get institutionally organized as such, a metaphorical cleavage can emerge. A cleavage is a metaphor for country-specific politicized social inequalities. A cleavage is a characteristic at the country level and can be salient or pacified. Demonstration issues are always based on either side of a cleavage. We expect that cleavage specific supply of protest will mobilize cleavage specific demand of protest. That is why crowds will align to the cleavage in which the protest event roots in terms of social class, political values and organizational embeddedness. We argue that this process of alignment will in turn be influenced by the cleavage structure in a country. In countries with a salient class cleavage, there remains less space for new or other cleavages. We assume that in these politicized contexts demonstrations each will attract their own specific target groups, which will lead to a selective protest crowd. In such context we expect much alignment between issue and crowd. Contrary, in countries with a pacified class cleavage, there is enough space for new or other cleavage issues. We assume that in this context all social movement organizations (the mobilizers) will use broad mobilizing frames in order to speak to an encompassing mobilization potential. This will lead to diverse crowds in demonstrations. A diverse crowd means that the crowd resembles the general population – more than would be the case with a selective crowd -. As a result, in a pacified context there is less alignment between issue and crowd. In this paper, we compare social class positions, political values and organizational embeddedness within crowds of street demonstrations on both anti-austerity and socio-cultural and political issues in four countries in Europe: Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Great Britain. These countries differ in the pacification of the class cleavage. For this, we exploit a dataset ‘Caught in the act of protest. Contextualizing Contestation (CCC)’. This dataset comprises of survey data on participants of street demonstrations in Europe. The results show that crowds and cleavages indeed do align in terms of socio-economic status, political values and organizational embeddedness. This outcome is stronger when the class cleavage in a country is salient. The more salient a cleavage, the more politicized inequalities will be seen. This leads to more cleavage based social movement organizations who mobilize within the constituency of this cleavage. The politicized social stratification in society becomes a frame that puts the street demonstration in that perspective. What we see is a selective and aligned crowd on the streets.