When Discourse Opens Space: Elite Rhetoric, Protest Dynamics, and the Making of Political Opportunities

Research on political contention increasingly recognizes that rhetoric shapes the strategic environment in which social movements operate, yet the temporal relationship between elite discourse and protest remains contested. This study asks whether protest follows pre-existing rhetorical opportunities or actively contributes to creating them. We theorize rhetorical opportunity structures as emerging from elite attention to specific policy dimensions and narrative frames, which signal openings for mobilization. Protest may arise within these favorable discursive spaces, or alternatively, protest itself may reshape elite rhetoric by pushing new issues and narratives onto the political agenda. To evaluate these dynamics, the study combines protest event analysis with a comprehensive corpus of party policy rhetoric drawn from party press releases and parliamentary speeches in Spain from 1990 to 2025. Using computational text analysis, we identify narrative structures and measure discursive similarity between social movement actors, members of parliament, and political parties. Dynamic network analysis then traces how rhetorical alignments and divergences evolve over time. The findings illuminate the bidirectional interplay between protest and elite discourse, offering new evidence on when political rhetoric enables mobilization and when mobilization transforms the rhetorical landscape. The study advances theories of political opportunity by integrating discursive processes into long-term analyses of contentious politics.