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Starting from a definition of altruism as situations in which a given actor sustains harm while another actor gains benefits, we compare the behaviors of respondents in relation to the members of three main groups of beneficiaries—refugees and asylum seekers, unemployed people, and people with disabilities—through the analysis of original survey data collected in eight European countries ( N ~ 16,000) in the TransSOL project. We investigate in particular the reasons why people act on behalf of each of these three groups without being a member of any of them or having close ties with any individuals in these groups. These respondents are compared with respondents who are members of these groups and/or have close ties with people within them so as to isolate the factors underlying individual-level altruistic behavior. Our results show that political altruism emerges out of a complex combination of factors and is not simply reducible to social structural positions, subjective feelings of attachment or resources, but is the result of the interaction of these influences and that these vary when looking at support for different social groups.

Economic outcomes have long been neglected by students of social movements. However, recently a number of studies have emerged addressing this topic. This chapter reviews works on economic outcomes of social movements. Economic impacts of social movements are defined here as pertaining to the economic sphere either in terms of government actions to regulate the economy/impose redistribution/reform the practices of companies and corporations, or to changes in social practices and individual behavior with respect to consumption. As such, the current review addresses scholarship on movements' attempts to attain government regulation in markets, governments' direct interventions in markets, and changes in market rules and practices in the social sphere.

In this paper we analyse the extent to which perceptions of the government's role in the economic crisis impacted on the political behaviour of European citizens. This includes contentious political activities such as attending public meetings, participating in demonstrations, and joining strikes, but also electoral behaviour in the form of voting against the incumbent. We examine data from 2015 since it allows us to examine European nations experiencing different economic conditions as a result of the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent period of recession. We find that individuals who blamed the national government for the economic crisis and who were more unsatisfied with the government's handling of unemployment were more likely to participate. However, the effect of these variables varied across different forms of political behaviour. Moreover, the study provides evidence that the effect of the perceptions of one's own economic situation on political behaviour is conditional upon the perceptions people have of the way in which the government is dealing with the situation, and specifically with unemployment, a key marker of the extent of the negative effects of the economic crisis across European nations.

Previous studies have found that left-wing and libertarian individuals are more likely to engage in extra-institutional political activism. However, due to a lack of suitable data, studies to date have not analysed the relative influence of economic redistributive and social libertarian values for the intensity of protest participation. By analysing data from a unique cross-national dataset on participants in mass demonstrations in seven countries, this article addresses this gap in the literature and provides evidence of the relative impact of economic redistributive and social libertarian values in explaining different degrees of protest participation. We show that there are divergent logics underpinning the effect of the two value sets on extra-institutional participation. While both economically redistributive and libertarian social values support extra-institutional participation, economically redistributive protesters are mobilized to political action mainly through organizations, whereas the extra-institutional participation of social libertarian protesters is underpinned by their dissatisfaction with the workings of democracy.

This article investigates the involvement of alternative action organizations in three forms of political advocacy in an attempt to gauge their degree of politicization. These forms can be understood as representing three different ways of making political claims: by raising public awareness with respect to a given cause or issue, by trying to influence the policy maker through "insider" lobbying activities, and by protesting in the streets as "outsiders." Our findings show strong cross-national variations in all three forms of political activities, although not always following a consistent pattern. They also suggest that there is a relationship between the severity of the economic crisis and the form of advocacy. Most important, our analysis suggests that the politicization of alternative action organizations depends both on certain internal characteristics such as their degree of formalization and professionalization, as well as their thematic focus, and the scope of their activities, and on the broader context in terms of economic crisis, austerity policies, and political opportunities. As regards the latter, we find an impact especially on lobbying and protesting.

We discuss a number of issues addressed in the volume. In particular, after an introduction about the capacity for resilience shown by European citizens, we summarize the volume's content in terms of the economic crisis posing constraints to citizens, but also as opening up opportunities for change. Additionally, we discuss the intertwining of the economic and the political dimensions, which we see as one of the main lessons to be drawn from the analyses presented in the previous chapters. Finally, we suggest a number of avenues for further research on the impact of economic crises on citizens.

We would like to thank to the World Values Survey Association, especially Professor Yilmaz Esmer and his team for the development of World Values Survey data set for Turkey. We would also like to thank to Professor Ayhan Kaya and Dr Cristiano Bee as well as Professor Paul Kubicek and our anonymous reviewer for the efforts they made in the publication process. This work was financially supported by Turkish Ministry of Education Study Abroad Program. ; This research aims to understand the extent to which generation and social class determine Turkish respondents' level of political activism. It tests both the macroeconomic socialization effect and the social class effect on political activism as hypothesized by Inglehart and Lipset, respectively. It also strives to understand whether a macropolitical period effect may also some generational implications for political activism. Beyond these examinations, it also raises a challenge to Lipset's working-class authoritarianism thesis - within the particular area of political activism - for those generations which came of age under an authoritarian politico-juridical order as well as for those which did not. ; Turkish Ministry of Education Study Abroad Program

AbstractThe economic crisis that started in 2008 has negatively affected European nations to different degrees. The sudden rise in demonstrations particularly in those countries most hard hit by the crisis suggests that grievance theories, dismissed in favour of resource‐based models since the 1970s, might have a role to play in explaining protest behaviour. While most previous studies have tested these theories at the individual or contextual levels, it is likely that mechanisms at both levels are interrelated. To fill this lacuna, this article examines the ways in which individual‐level grievances interact with macro‐level factors to impact on protest behaviour. In particular, it examines whether the impact of individual subjective feelings of deprivation is conditional on contextual macroeconomic and policy factors. It is found that while individual‐level relative deprivation has a direct effect on the propensity to have protested in the last year, this effect is greater under certain macroeconomic and political conditions. Both significant results for the cross‐level interactions are interpreted in terms of their role for opening up political opportunities for protest among those who feel they have been most deprived in the current crisis. These findings suggest that the interaction of the contextual and individual levels should continue to be explored in future studies in order to further clarify the mechanisms underlying protest behaviour.

We examine the relationship between material deprivation and different types of responses to economic crises by civil society actors. We are interested in understanding whether material deprivation has an effect on civil society reactions to the crisis and whether political opportunity factors contribute to this relationship. In particular, we wish to ascertain if the effect of material deprivation is moderated by perceptions of political stability, on one hand, and of the effectiveness of government, on the other. Our results show that the effect of material deprivation on various aspects of responses to the crisis varies depending on the perceptions of the political environment. This suggests that perceptions of political stability and government effectiveness feed into the interpretation of present conditions. Therefore, perceptions of political stability and government effectiveness act as signals leading material deprivation to become politicized as a grievance.Related Articles in this Special Issue

Cinalli, Manlio, and
Marco Giugni. 2016. "" Politics & Policy 44 (): 427–446. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12159/abstract


Temple, Luke,
Maria T. Grasso,
Barbara Buraczynska, ." Politics & Policy 44 (): 553–576. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12161/abstract


English, Patrick,
Maria T. Grasso,
Barbara Buraczynska,
Sotirios Karampampas, and
Luke Temple. "." Politics & Policy 44 (): 577–603. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12160/abstract

The economic crisis that started in 2008 has negatively affected European nations to different degrees. The sudden rise in demonstrations particularly in those countries most hard hit by the crisis suggests that grievance theories, dismissed in favour of resource-based models since the 1970s, might have a role to play in explaining protest behaviour. While most previous studies have tested these theories at the individual or contextual levels, it is likely that mechanisms at both levels are interrelated. To fill this lacuna, this article examines the ways in which individual-level grievances interact with macro-level factors to impact on protest behaviour. In particular, it examines whether the impact of individual subjective feelings of deprivation is conditional on contextual macroeconomic and policy factors. It is found that while individual-level relative deprivation has a direct effect on the propensity to have protested in the last year, this effect is greater under certain macroeconomic and political conditions. Both significant results for the cross-level interactions are interpreted in terms of their role for opening up political opportunities for protest among those who feel they have been most deprived in the current crisis. These findings suggest that the interaction of the contextual and individual levels should continue to be explored in future studies in order to further clarify the mechanisms underlying protest behaviour.

We examine the relationship between material deprivation and different types of responses to economic crises by civil society actors. We are interested in understanding whether material deprivation has an effect on civil society reactions to the crisis and whether political opportunity factors contribute to this relationship. In particular, we wish to ascertain if the effect of material deprivation is moderated by perceptions of political stability, on one hand, and of the effectiveness of government, on the other. Our results show that the effect of material deprivation on various aspects of responses to the crisis varies depending on the perceptions of the political environment. This suggests that perceptions of political stability and government effectiveness feed into the interpretation of present conditions. Therefore, perceptions of political stability and government effectiveness act as signals leading material deprivation to become politicized as a grievance.

Studying the outcomes of social movements is important if we want to elucidate the role of collective action in society. While most works have addressed aggregate-level political outcomes such as changes in laws or new policies, a relatively small but substantial body of literature deals with the personal and biographical consequences of social movements at the micro-level, that is, effects on the life-course of individuals who have participated in movement activities, due at least in part to involvement in those activities (see Giugni 2004 for a review). In general, these studies converge in suggesting that activism has a strong effect both on the political and personal lives of the subjects. Most of the existing studies, however, share a number of features that limit the scope of their findings. First, they focus on a specific kind of movement participants, namely movement activists, most often New Left activists, who are strongly committed to the cause. Yet, as suggested by McAdam (1999a), not more than between 2% and 4% of the American population took part in New Left activism of the 1960s. As a result, we cannot directly generalize from these findings to the biographical impact of participation in social movements by less strongly committed people who, in addition, might belong to other ideological areas, not necessarily to the New Left. Second, they use only a limited number of subjects and often do not analyze non-activists. The possibility of generalizing the findings is therefore very limited due to the small samples used and the lack of a control group of non-activists. Third, they look at a specific geographical and area and historical period, namely the United States (or often even more circumscribed geographical areas) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As such, we do not know from these studies how movement participation may affect the lives of people more generally. Thus, overall, in spite of the crucial insights that these works provided, they have little to say about the effects of more "routine" forms of participation. In this chapter we try to go beyond the traditional focus on highly committed New Left activism to investigate the impact of protest participation on political life-course patterns amongst the general population. Our main research question is the following: Does participation in social movement activities, such as participation in protest activities, have an enduring impact on the subsequent political life of individuals?

Environmental movements are networks of informal interactions that may include individuals, groups, and organizations engaged in collective action motivated by shared identity or concern about environmental issues. This article reviews literature on environmental movements (including antinuclear energy movements) according to four main aspects: the social bases and values underlying the movements' mobilization, the resources support- ing their mobilization, the political opportunities channeling their mobilization, and the cultural framing processes through which environmental issues are defined as social and political problems to be addressed through mobilization. In addition, we consider the historical antecedents and roots of environmental movements. Finally, we discuss the interplay between the local and the global levels and the movements' impacts, a long neglected issue in the social movement literature. Our review highlights three main features of environmental movements: they are heterogeneous; they have profoundly transformed themselves; and they have generally become more institutionalized.