Changing the debate? The NoG20 protests and their effects on the parliamentary debates on police reform in Hamburg

In the social movement studies, there has been a resurgent interest in the effects of collective actors, in particular, their impact on public policy. Scholars found that collective actors often function as “agenda setters”, raising awareness to specific political needs. Even though, agenda setting is a core concept within the political science, theoretical insights, for example, from the “multiple streams” framework (Kingdon 2011) have rarely informed social movement research. This paper seeks to fill this gap by analyzing the evolution of a parliamentary debate on a reform that was introduced after the violent protests against the G20 summit 2017 in Hamburg. By means of a frame analysis, the paper identifies core diagnostic, motivational, and prognostic frames that informed the parliamentary debates on a specific police reform in Hamburg. Examining the parliamentary debates on the same reform in 2008, 2011, 2014, 2018, the paper is able to show how the framing of this debate changed over time. The analysis demonstrates how the NoG20 protests made available a new problem framing, enabling the proponents of the police reform to point to a factual need for policy change. With reference to the concept of “policy windows” (Kingdon 2011), it is argued that the NoG20 protests were sought as an opportunity for policy change, by discursively linking the protests to the analyzed reform. However, the paper also shows how the NoG20 protests not only discursively enabled, but also constrained parliamentarians. Frames that dominated early parliamentary debates, which rationalized policy change with reference to “police violence”, disappeared after the NoG20 protests. It is argued that they became unavailable due to a strong victimization frame related to the physical and mental stress that police officers deployed during the NoG20 protests had experienced. In sum, the paper shows how incidents of collective action, such as the NoG20 protests, can function as “focusing” (Kingdon 2011, Birkland 2016) or what social movement scholars have called “transformative” events (Sewell 1996a, 1996b, 2005; McAdam/Sewell 2001). As such, they can become central elements in the process of agenda setting, eventually informing policy change.