Contention in Times of Political Disappointment and Anxiety: Post-Accession Environmental Protest in the Czech Republic

Both national and international, mostly European, political contexts have shaped post-1989 environmental activism in the Czech Republic. Although earlier phases of this influence have been thoroughly analyzed, we primarily focus on the most current time period. Our previous research on protest politics has shown that: (1) The European Union (EU) and its pre-accession funding schemes importantly facilitated activist organizations and their cooperation in post-materialist issue areas, environmentalism included. (2) The issue composition of protest politics has been determined by the content of party competition, whether the main conflict line was prevalently socioeconomic or sociocultural. Since the country joined the EU in 2004, and the content of domestic party competition has undergone a transformation after 2013, when the prevalently socioeconomic logic of party competition started to dissipate, the analyzed country case gives us a unique opportunity to study possible effects of changes in both international and domestic contexts on protest. Although the direct influence of the EU decreased in domestic affairs in the post-accession period, its salience as a political issue increased in relation to the Eurozone and migrant crises. After 2013 the general content of main policy issues has changed in relation to a major realignment in party politics (the emergence of and establishment in power of the populist political organization ANO of current Prime Minister A. Babiš). First, this paper aims at conceptualizing the interaction between different layers of political context for Czech environmental activism, and second, it aims to analyze how various combinations of political context relate to its intensity and cooperation patterns. Our analysis builds on a unique protest event dataset covering the whole period of post-communist development up until 2017.