Protesting Migration: Explaining Spatial and Temporal Variation in German Localities

Migration has become one of the most contested political issues in Europe, prompting renewed scholarly attention to how societal conflicts around immigration unfold. Existing research demonstrates an intensification of contention over migration in recent decades and a deepening of the integration-demarcation cleavage, yet empirical analyses overwhelmingly rely on national-level aggregates of protest activity. As a result, we know little about how migration-related protest varies across local contexts or evolves over time. With few exceptions—mainly studies on political violence or far-right mobilization—the local dynamics of migration-related contention remain largely unexamined. Systematic cross-locality comparisons are absent, in part due to the lack of fine-grained protest event catalogues. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a new county-level protest event dataset for Germany covering the period 2014–2024. The dataset is built using a multi-stage pipeline that applies finetuned large language models to 129 regional newspapers, yielding nearly 39,000 migration-related protest events. Crucially, the coding distinguishes between protest in support of and in opposition to immigration, enabling a more nuanced analysis of conflict dynamics. We complement this event data with socio-demographic, political, and associational indicators at the county level. Drawing on this comprehensive dataset, we examine the determinants of spatial and temporal variation in migration-related protest. We test a broad set of hypotheses derived from theories of grievances, mobilization resources, and political opportunity structures. Our multivariate analyses show that local variation in migration-related protest is driven less by objective migration-related grievances than by differences in the strength of local civil society and the presence of pro- and anti-migration political actors. We also find a strong interactive dynamic, with anti-migration protests frequently met by counterprotests in support of migration. By illuminating how local political and civil-society contexts shape patterns of contention, the paper advances our understanding of migration-related conflict and contributes a novel data resource for the study of local protest politics more broadly.