Degrees of participation: depicting the grey area between individual and collective actors in Italian climate campaigns

Following the student strikes started by Greta Thunberg in 2019, the climate movement has mobilized millions of activists in more than 150 countries. In Italy, this movement has managed to catalyze an impressive turnout even after the pandemic: on several occasions between 2021 and 2022, tens of thousands of protesters returned to occupy the streets. During the 2018-2019 period, several studies have highlighted the presence of a tendency among the protesters: the movement attracts people who are young, not affiliated to social movement organizations, and who have never participated in past demonstrations (Wahlström et al. 2019; Saunders et al. 2020). The persistence of this tendency during a later phase is a matter of empirical investigation since in all countries, including Italy, the movement have faced constraints due to the Covid-19 measures as well as opportunities for maturing and transforming. Hence potentially its composition might have changed. Drawing from some classic theories of social movement studies (McCarthy and Zald 1977, McAdam 1986, Klandermans et al. 2014), this contribution attempts to investigate whether climate participation sets in terms of degrees, rather than dichotomously. We hypothesize, first, that different blocs of most similar activists emerge when we disentangle affiliations and repertoires. Second, that the bloc to which the activists belong influences the visions of the future strategic choices of the mobilization. From a methodological point of view, the proposal is based on protest survey methods (Mayer et al. 1997). More specifically, five surveys were administered during five climate mobilisations in Italy between September 2021 and March 2022. The questionnaires (N =1160) collected contain questions on protesters’ socio-demographic characteristics, their affiliations, the repertoires of contention and their political orientation. Through the implementation of the latent class analysis techniques, we report how the climate protesters are divided into different blocs according to their organizational affiliation and movement embeddedness, along with the repertoires of contention adopted. Therefore, we show that tracing different blocs of climate activists provides a granular picture of the mobilization: preferring a repertoire as future strategic choice (being in favour of consensual or contentious collective action) is affected by the bloc to which activists belong. The paper contributes to the social movement studies through an empirical reflection that touches on the positions occupied by protesters, their availability to adopt a specific repertoire of contention and, more broadly, their role in the new progressive movements.