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Discarding protests? Relating crisis experience to approval of protests among activists and bystanders

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Abstract

To what extent does the economic crisis affect support for political protest? Since the outburst of the financial crisis in 2008 many protests have been mobilized against national governments and their austerity policies. In some countries, these actions were described in the media as having little support among the general public, while elsewhere these actions enjoyed significant public support. Surprisingly little scholarly work has examined this variation. We fill this research gap by investigating who approves of austerity protests, how bystanders’ attitudes differ from the activists’ approval of protests and how repertoires relate to the approval of austerity protests. The analysis uses original survey data from nine European countries affected by the recent economic crisis at varying degrees and demonstrates that protest experience, both at the country and individual level, relates to approval of anti-austerity protests. The severity of economic crisis increases is positively related to protest approval in general terms, but there are differences depending on the type of grievances and which forms of austerity protests are considered.

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Notes

  1. Survey details are presented in the Technical appendix of the Livewhat Integrated report on individual responses to crises deliverable 4.2. available at: http://www.livewhat.unige.ch/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Integrated-Report.pdf.

  2. The economy, Poverty, Education, Unemployment, Healthcare, Precarious employment, Immigration, Childcare.

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Correspondence to Camilo Cristancho.

Appendix: Discarding protests? Relating crisis experience to approval of protests among activists and bystanders

Appendix: Discarding protests? Relating crisis experience to approval of protests among activists and bystanders

See Tables 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10.

Table 6 Question wording and operationalization
Table 7 OLS
Table 8 OLS
Table 9 OLS with interaction effects
Table 10 Approval of protest against austerity measures by contextual severity of the crisis (OLS coefficients for normalized values)

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Cristancho, C., Uba, K. & Zamponi, L. Discarding protests? Relating crisis experience to approval of protests among activists and bystanders. Acta Polit 54, 430–457 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-017-0061-1

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