Does Protest Matter? Parties’ Rhetorical Reactions to Protesters’ Claims in Comparative Perspective
Year: 2016
Type: dissertation
Abstract: In my PhD thesis I disentangle the rhetorical reactions of political parties to\npublic opinion and protest. Previous research on political responsiveness of\nparties pre-eminently views the relation between public opinion polls and\nparty agendas as the key feature of responsiveness (Miller and Stokes 1963;\nSoroka and Wlezien 2010; Stimson, Mackuen, and Erikson 1995; Burstein\n1998; Adams et al. 2006; Ezrow 2010). Yet, taking to the street has become\nan ever more important toolbox to articulate popular grievances. Social\nmovements have emerged throughout Western advanced democracies and\ntransformed the political landscape in Europe. Also new political parties\nemerged from these social movements – such as Green parties and the\nNew Left (Kitschelt 1994; Kriesi et al. 1992). It is, therefore, surprising that\nthe link between political parties and protest has largely remained a lacuna\nin social movement studies and the literature on party competition.\nMy thesis is a first attempt to address this gap. I argue that besides public\nopinion polls, political protest will affect party position taking. I hypothesise\nthat growing protest leads to polarisation of party systems. While all\nparties will increase their attention to the issue at stake during protest in\nan effort to secure votes and/or office, they respond differently to protest\ncontingent on how their ideology relates to protesters’ demands. Furthermore,\nthe success of protest depends on its support by the public at large. I\ntest my theoretical framework using a new and unique data-set containing\nparty positions on nuclear energy – revealed in interviews, press statements\nand press conferences – of 67 parties across 12 Western Democracies. I run\ntime-series-cross-sectional models to test my theoretical arguments. Traditionally\nsusceptible to responding to anti-nuclear protest, parties of the left\nunderstand increased protest as a window of opportunity to influence policy\ndebate in their favour, while right-wing parties perceive protest as a\nthreat to their ideological position on the usage of nuclear energy. Furthermore,\nI aim to understand in my last empirical chapter whether protest\nalso affects parties’ issue emphasis in manifestos. To this end, I use the\nComparative Manifesto Project data and protest data on 18 democracies across 15 years to estimate how parties adapted their issue emphasis to\npostmaterialist issues. While I again find a significant influence of protest\non parties’ issue emphasis, the polarisation hypothesis does not find support\nin my last chapter. Finally, the instrumental variable models used in\nthis last chapter suggest that the causal direction runs from protest to parties’\nposition.
Source: Figshare
Author: Daniel Bischof
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2339465768