Citizen Protest Attitudes in the Covid Crisis: A Comparison of Hungary and Austria

Protest participation is regarded as an integral part of democratic life and an instrument in the hand of the people to express discontent and to shape their political and social environment (Della Porta 1999). By now modern states have become ‘demonstration-democracies’ (Van Aelst and Walgrave 2001: 85), or in different words ‘movement societies’ (Meyer and Tarrow 1998). It is believed that the success of a protest relies upon public opinion and the movements’ capability to mobilize citizens for their demonstrations in support of the goals of the movement. Scholars tend to interpret public support as mobilization potential (Klandermans 2004). Despite widespread interest to study political protests and social movements, citizens’ attitude to protests is a relatively under-researched topic in political sociology (Barker, Nalder and Newham 2020). The paper scrutinizes people’s attitudes towards both protest events and protesters. Using an original item battery, we study attitudes regarding protest events and protesters by focusing on both negative (e.g., ‘protesters are trouble-makers’) and positive (e.g., ‘demonstrations are important elements of democracy’) attitudes in a cross-country comparison focusing on Austria and Hungary. The analysis builds on online surveys conducted in May/June 2021 in Hungary and Austria. We test the hypothesis that due to the ‘normalization’ of protest politics during the past couple of decades, attitudes towards protests cannot be explained by the socio-economic characteristics of respondents. Instead, left-right orientation, political trust, and party preferences are important predictors. Interestingly we find that negative and positive attitudes towards protest events and protesters are different artefacts, that is, negative and positive attitudes are not part of a single scale running from rejection to the support. Our results are in line with our expectations concerning the relevant predictors of these factors: our study supports our hypothesis that socio-economic characteristics do not influence the positive or negative attitudes towards protest events and protesters. Furthermore, we have also found that rightist political orientation positively predicts negative attitudes towards protest events, however, leftist orientation does not significantly affect positive attitudes. Thus, while rightist respondents regard protests as harmful, there is no significant difference between leftists and rightists in their opinion how important demonstrations are for democracies. Finally, we find cross-country differences in terms of political trust, and its link to protest support in Austria and Hungary. Our findings show that citizens’ ideological traits and attitudes to authority and to the political regime shape attitudes to political protests.