Rough days in democracies: Comparing protests in democracies

Abstract

Abstract. Democratic political institutions are generally designed to channel public opinion; yet citizens often take to the streets in protest. Why would citizens, provided with formal mechanisms to affect the policy process, resort to extraordinary means? This article argues that the strength of representative institutions influences the likelihood of protest. The democratic institution literature does not address the issue of protest and in the protest literature effects of the democratic governmental structure have been largely underestimated. However, the diversity in government formats across democratic states and the corresponding variation in amount of protests leads one to question the relationship between them. This article identifies the variation in the scale of protests among democratic regimes in Western European countries using the European Protest and Coercion Data and explains protest using variation in the forms of government. Protesters in democratic countries with a weak legislature find it difficult to deliver their demands to government due to the institutional environment. Therefore, they are more inclined to protest than citizens in countries with a strong legislature. This argument is tested along with other structural variables and supported by results from testing models using ordinary least squares with panel‐corrected standard errors.

Tax policy and tax protest in 20 rich democracies, 1980–2010

“…Model 3 introduces control variables that have been found to be important in social movement studies. Social movement scholars commonly argue that the presence of partisan allies or enemies in government affects the likelihood of protest (McAdam ; McAdam and Su ; Meyer ; Nam ; Soule, McAdam, McCarthy and Su ; Tarrow ; Van Dyke ). We therefore include a variable for left party share of the legislature .…”

Protest Event Analysis and Its Offspring

“…1 Furthermore, among the third generation were those who tried to be more efficient by using electronic approaches to select (and even code) protest events. Most prominent examples of half-automated procedures are (a) the European protest and coercion data (EPCD) collected by Francisco et al (e.g., Francisco 1996;Nam 2006Nam , 2007Reising 1998Reising , 1999 events. Unfortunately, these projects tend to fall back on the first generation of research when it comes to the selection of sources and coding procedures and/or their value for comparative research (Imig 2001, 256f.).…”

Union Density and Political Strikes

“…My main argument is that political strikes are most frequent in countries with intermediate levels of union density, since trade unions in these countries are strong enough to organize effective protests but not strong enough to ensure that governments will 36 Tomz, King, and Zeng 1999;King and Zeng 1999;King and Zeng 2001. 37 The protest indicators in Banks 2009 have been criticized since they rely on a narrow selection of newspaper reports (Nam 2006;Robertson and Teitelbaum 2010). For this and other reasons, the measure of political strikes in Western Europe that I used in the main analyses is likely to be much more precise.…”

“…On the one hand, centralization may increase the capacity of unions to organize political strikes in the first place. On the other hand, centralized trade unions may be better able 23 This idea goes back to the work of authors such as Eisinger 1973and McAdam 1999[1982 and has been developed by Kriesi et al 1995 andTarrow 1998, among others. 24 Nam 2007 shows that the openness of the political system is negatively related to protest activity, and vernby 2007 shows that the frequency of economic strikes is higher in majoritarian political systems. See also Scartascini and Tommasi 2012. 25 I have also tried two dummies rather than one-one for countries with a tripartite council (the "formal" dimension of corporatist policy-making) and one for the routine involvement of interest organizations (the "informal" dimension of corporatist policy-making).…”