Fields of economic contention: cross-country perspective

Several decades of neoliberal restructuring led to inquiries related to the societal responses to economic transformations, famously captured by K. Polanyi's concept of societal countermovement (Polanyi 1944; Almeida, Pérez Martín 2022). Various protest cycles challenging the logic of neoliberal policies arise and are coordinated by labour, civil society organizations, or political parties. Despite their differences in organizing structures, repertoires, or political ideologies, these actors become part of the specific field of economic contention (Melucci 1996; Crossley 2002). These are relational arenas or meso-level orders of collective action (Diani, Mische 2017) where different actors have topical (sometimes contradictory) stakes, strategies, and targets. Over time, new structures of coordination of collective action occur, are reproduced, or transformed: depending on the change of short-term political-economic opportunities or threats, some actors engage in contention and participate in protest alliances while others withdraw and isolate. This paper aims at further conceptualization and empirical mapping of fields of economic contention using the relational perspective in the study of collective action (Emirbayer 1997; Diani 2015). More specifically, it compares fields of economic contention in two post-socialist countries with the history of rapid re-instalment of capitalism after 1989 – Czechia and Slovakia. The cultural and institutional proximity of these countries enables longitudinal comparison of how short-term political-economic contexts (main type of conflict, access to the institutions, economic and welfare policies) relate to the structure of the field of economic contention. This contribution aims both at descriptive (What type of actors are engaged? What type of actors has highest probability to cross sector boundaries? What is the dominant mode of coordination?) and conceptual (Does mode of coordination in the field change with political-economic context? How?) contribution. I rely on the datasets of economic protest events (1989-2022) in Czechia (N= 2042) and Slovakia (N=2077), which were selected from electronic archives of public press agencies (CTK, TASR) and coded. Identification and measuring of relational aspects of collective action are based on social network analysis that is applied to protest event data (e.g. Wada 2014). I identify protest cooperation as tie/s between two or more collective actors (organizations, groups) which is indicated by their co-presence of these organizations at the same protest event (i.e. sharing time, place and attendants). Such a tie between collective actors is treated as undirected as organizations did not take part in the event without the consent of other organizing or participating actor(s). The value of tie equals the number of joint co-occurrences of two groups at the event.