Please join the Harriman Institute and the East Central European Center for a talk by Katerina Vrablikova (University of Bath and István Deák Visiting Professor at Columbia University).
Contemporary democracies show considerable differences in the issue composition of their protest politics, which tends to remain relatively stable over time. In countries such as Germany and the Czech Republic, the vast majority of protests have been mobilized around sociocultural issues—human rights, peace, nuclear power, the environment—and only a tiny portion around economic issues.
On the other hand, protests in countries such as France and Poland tend to revolve around economic issues, with protesters voicing demands relating to material redistribution and social policy. What lies behind the cross‐country differences in national protest agendas?
The national protest agenda depends on what issues mainstream political parties are contesting: the content and strength of the master‐issue dimension. In reference to the literature on the multidimensional political space and niche political parties, one should expect a substitutive effect; where the stronger a specific master‐issue dimension is in party politics, the less salient that issue dimension is in protest politics. This substitutive effect results from the tendency of electoral politics to reduce political conflict to a single‐dimension equilibrium, which decreases the importance of other issues and relegates the contest over secondary, niche issues to the realm of policy‐seeking strategies, with protest being a common manifestation of this political strategy.
In party systems where single‐dimension equilibrium does not exist and the master‐issue dimension is weaker, the same dynamics result in a more convergent relationship between party and protest politics and a greater similarity between the protest‐ and party‐system agendas. To investigate this theory, Vrablikova examines the national protest agendas in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, which show four combinations of two crucial factors that are not available in older Western democracies: the content and the strength of the master‐issue dimension. The study draws on an original dataset of protest events organised in the four countries between 1993 and 2010, and on qualitative and quantitative data on issue dimensions of party politics obtained from studies on party politics and expert surveys.
