Alliance building and eventful protests: comparing Spanish and Portuguese trajectories under the Great Recession

Abstract

Social movement research has shed light on the relationship between processes of alliance building and multiple factors related to political opportunities, framing, identities, networks and resource mobilization. However, less is known about the impact of eventful protests on coalition building dynamics. Drawing on a paired comparison between the Portuguese and Spanish cycles of protest under the Great Recession, we aim at accounting for social movement alliances over time. While these countries present parallel protest dynamics until 2011, after that point two eventful protests lead each country into different trajectories. While the cycle in Portugal was marked by intermittent large protest events dominated by institutional actors, in Spain the peak of mobilization was consistently high between 2011 and 2013. When comparing these cases two factors stand out: the mobilization capacity and the autonomy of new emerging actors vis-à-vis institutional ones. Eventful protests were a key factor in articulating these elements. In Spain, the strength and autonomy of 15M assemblies and anti-austerity actors facilitated the formation of strategic alliances with trade unions. In Portugal, transversal initiatives and sustained alliances did not follow after the Geração à Rasca events. These emerged only later in the cycle, however were nonetheless hampered by overlapping membership and a lack of autonomy from institutional actors. Two original protest event analysis datasets are used to illustrate these arguments.

Protest Event Dataset for Croatia, Portugal, Serbia and Spain

“…Though there are many directions in which numbers from Table 3 could be explored, an obvious one is a historical contextualisation of protest mobilization waves from the period of the Great Recession 2008-2015. Studies have established the surge of mass mobilizations in this period in Spain and Portugal (Accornero and Pinto, 2015;Portos, 2016;Romanos, 2017;Flesher Fominaya, 2017;Della Porta et al, 2017;Portos and Carvalho, 2019), and our data reconfirm these findings. In Portugal the relative stability in protest numbers between 2000 and 2008 made way to a general strike mobilizing 3 million people in 2010 and a peak in protest numbers in 2012.…”

Resisting the Great Recession: Social movement unionism in Croatia and Serbia

“…In periods of crisis, it is important to study union strategies in relation to broad patterns of social contention rather than as isolated phenomena. Studies of the post-2008 cycle of contention in Southern Europe have shown how unions aligned with other social actors in organizing mass protests so their repertoire of contention expanded, rather than contracted (Accornero and Pinto, 2015; Portos and Carvalho, 2019). Organized labour makes its voice heard through collective bargaining, but workers also express their grievances by means of protests, demonstrations or petitions (Campos Lima and Artiles, 2018), or as Mathers et al (2018) argue, trade union deinstitutionalization has ‘opened up civil society as a terrain on which to remobilise trade unionism as a social movement’ (p. 14).…”

Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Mapping Contentiousness

“…unceasing and sustained wave of contention until the end of 2013" (see also Portos and Carvalho 2019). As is well documented, the massive protest wave in Spain spilled over into electoral politics, giving rise to a new party, Podemos, and leading to a significant restructuring of Spanish politics (e.g., della Porta et al 2017b;Vidal and Sánchez-Vítores 2019).…”

“…Faced with a dire economic situation and increasing European pressure, the mainstream left in government -PS in Portugal and PSOE in Spainannounced severe austerity measures throughout 2009(e.g., Bremer and Vidal 2018. Consequently, the two countries saw union-organized protest against the measures early in the crisis (e.g., Accornero and Ramos Pinto 2015;della Porta et al 2017a;; Portos 2019). Both countries experienced a turning point in 2011 when further noninstitutional actors entered the scene: Geração à Rasca (Screwed Generation) in in Portugal and 15M (named after the first large-scale protests on May 15, 2011) in Spain.…”