Profiling protesters: A multidimensional analysis of political trust, efficacy, and political interest across diverse protests

Recent protests across Europe have drawn renewed attention to the role of political disaffection in protest participation. Studies on political trust and protest participation have long been focused on establishing the difference between protesters and non-protesters, showing that the former generally display lower levels of trust in political institutions as well as lower levels of democratic satisfaction. More recent works have added nuance to this finding, demonstrating that protest participants differ considerably in their degree of trust and satisfaction, ranging from the disenchanted to the satisfied. In this paper, we aim to contribute to this literature by analyzing protest participants’ political trust and democratic satisfaction across a variety of different protest events in Germany. In doing so, we go beyond existing studies by a) analyzing the interaction of political trust and satisfaction with other relevant political attitudes, in particular political efficacy and interest and b) by basing this analysis not on general population surveys but on protest surveys. While the former allow for cross-national comparisons, it is doubtful whether they capture highly engaged protesters in sufficient numbers. In this paper, we therefore draw from original data from nine protest surveys collected between 2004 and 2020 in Germany, covering a broad range of topics such as climate change, migration, social policy, and infrastructure development (N = 5460). With the help of cluster analysis, we test the hypothesis that groups of protesters display various combinations of trust, efficacy, and political interest. Moreover, while protest research rarely differentiates between different types and issues of demonstrations, our data allows us to examine the interaction of attitudinal profiles and protest types and themes when explaining protest participation.