Suchergebnisse

Political protest and citizen participation are important drivers of democratic change. While previous research has identified both micro-level attitudes such as emancipative values and macro-level factors as drivers of protest behavior, we know little about how citizens' value-driven motivations interact with the political context. We argue that the effect of emancipative values on protest participation depends on both democratic institutions and the capacity of civil society mobilizations. Specifically, we expect the positive effect of emancipative values to be stronger in countries with higher democratic quality and more pro-democratic mass mobilizations, and weaker in countries with more pro-autocratic mass mobilizations. By combining survey and macro data for 88 democratic and autocratic regimes, we find that citizens' value orientations interact with democratic quality and the prevalence of pro-autocratic mass mobilizations in shaping protest participation. These results contribute to a better understanding of the structural and societal preconditions for democratic change.

During 1995–2008, workers in Vietnam instigated over 2,600 strikes, two-thirds of which occurred in the last four years. This article investigates what workers are demanding, what happens during strikes, their degree of organization, and the reactions of employers and state authorities to these protests. It also compares these workers' protests to labor unrest in the Republic of Vietnam. The analysis shows some similarities between the two periods in what workers have sought and the consequences of their protests. The contrasts, however, are more remarkable and help to highlight the significance of today's labor unrest for the current political system.

How does the elevated threat of protests during sensitive periods affect state repression in a high-capacity authoritarian regime? Drawing on a dataset of over 3,100 protests in three Chinese megacities, this study provides three key findings: first, the frequency of protests before and during national-level focal events and subsequent to national-level disruptive events is depressed, suggesting preemptive repression is taking place. Second, the likelihood of responsive repression is marginally reduced before and during local-level focal events and slightly elevated after national-level disruptive events. Third, contention is intensified when local political elites meet. Sensitive periods do not bring contention to a standstill and costly bursts of responsive repression were not observed. Stability maintenance during times of increased regime-vulnerability was thus less rigid than often assumed. (J Contemp China/GIGA)

The articles in this collection provide an alternative view of Middle Eastern history by focusing on the oppressed and the excluded, offering a challenge to the usual elite narratives.

One of the hallmarks of the Tunisian uprising that ousted President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011 was its broad base of support. To the surprise of many Middle East experts who had previously regarded co-opted and quiescent middle classes as the bedrock of stability for authoritarian regimes in the region, the Tunisian revolution rode on the back of a broad coalition of social forces that united an alienated intellectual elite with the rural poor and urban middle classes in opposition to the regime. It is a widely shared assumption that this joining of disparate forces would not have been possible without modern communication technologies and social media. But it is less clear exactly how such social media interacted with other contextual factors to bring about a national protest movement of sufficient proportions to topple an extremely entrenched authoritarian regime. Drawing on evidence from the popular protests in Tunisia between December 2010 and January 2011, expert interviews with Tunisian bloggers, and a web survey conducted among Tunisian Facebook users, this paper argues that social media (1) allowed a "digital elite" to form personal networks and circumvent the national media blackout by brokering information for outside mainstream media; (2) helped to overcome the "free rider" problem of collective action by reporting the magnitude of protest events; and (3) facilitated the formation of a national collective identity which was supportive of protest action and transcended geographical and socio-economic disparities by providing a shared, mobilizingelement of emotional grievance.

This article challenges the widespread belief that the recent success of Jean-Marie Le Pen and the Front National is due to a 'protest vote' on the part of the French electorate, a vote which thus lacks any 'core identity' and is therefore unsustainable in the long term. Through a geographical and sociological breakdown of the 2002 presidential and legislative elections the article first shows the extent to which support for Le Pen is clearly not a 'protest' but has a clear and recognisable base. Following this, the article aims to situate the notion of the 'protest vote' in the wider context of the continued 'moving right show' in contemporary social democracy.

L'article analitza el cas del campament estudiantil de protesta Plaza de la Resistència, instal·lat a Caracas durant els mesos d'abril i maig del 2014, en el context del cicle de protestes registrat a Veneçuela. Es revisen els factors contextuals antecedents del cicle de protestes i s'explora l'aplicabilitat en aquest cas de 10 dinàmiques identificades com a fonamentals en els moviments socials en xarxa. Així mateix, es fa una anàlisi de xarxes de l'usuari Twitter @PlzaResistencia que va servir per a la comunicació política autònoma i per a la propagació de les consignes dels campistes. ; The article analyses the case of the Plaza de la Resistencia student protest camp set up in Caracas in April and May 2014, in the context of the cycle of protests that occurred in Venezuela. Background contextual factors of the cycle of protests are reviewed and the applicability, to this case, of 10 dynamics identified as central to networked social movements are explored. An analysis of Twitter user @PlzaResistencia's network, which was used for autonomous political communications and for spreading campers' slogans, is also included. ; El artículo analiza el caso del campamento estudiantil de protesta Plaza de la Resistencia, instalado en Caracas durante los meses de abril y mayo de 2014, en el contexto del ciclo de protestas registrado en Venezuela. Se revisan los factores contextuales antecedentes del ciclo de protestas y se explora la aplicabilidad en este caso de diez dinámicas identificadas como fundamentales en los movimientos sociales en red. Asimismo, se hace un análisis de redes del usuario Twitter @PlzaResistencia que sirvió para la comunicación política autónoma y para la propagación de las consignas de los campistas.

The strategic use of irony and camp in protest movements presents a complex interplay between cultural expression and social action. We examine the deployment of these cultural forms in AIDS activism, proposing a social theory of irony and camp in protest. Through an analysis of 188 interviews from the ACT UP Oral History project, we identify three primary effects of irony and camp: diffusion of tension and critique engagement, solidarity building and recruitment facilitation, and invitation across symbolic boundaries to undermine legitimacy. These outcomes stem from the unique cultural forms of irony and camp, which accentuate the incongruities in protest situations and draw attention to symbolic boundaries between discursive communities. Our findings challenge the predominant focus on frame analysis in the cultural analysis of protests, advocating for a deeper examination of how ideas are communicated within social movements.

This article provides a theoretical account of the sudden rise and equally sudden demise of 1960s youth protest in many parts of the world. Quantitative data from a small sample of countries (N = 17) are used to illustrate the utility of the explanation through examination of its predictions. The theory focuses on two generally neglected issues: First, what are sources of normative commitments to collective action? Second, why were youth protests political in nature and frequently directed against the state? My account focuses on the diffusion of statism as a normative system throughout the world system and its influence on the dynamics of political conflict within nations. I measure two features of this system: (a) statist ideology and (b) political incorporation of national educational systems. The theory predicts how the diffusion of each of these dimensions will influence the level of noninstitutionalized youth protest within nations.

Abstract
This article examines the ideologies, practices, and aesthetics of the West Hollywood freaks, the Haight-Ashbury Diggers, and the Lower East Side Yippies between 1965 and 1969. These countercultural radicals conceptualized pleasure as a revolutionary heuristic: sex was central to critiques of middle-class culture and to effective strategies of resistance against the imperatives of the dominant order. The articulation of pleasure, performance, and protest by countercultural radicals has been unfairly obscured in the prevailing treatment of the counterculture by historians of mainstream liberalism, civil rights activism, and the New Left. Freak, Digger, and Yippie activists emphasized culture as the primary target of radical dissent and believed that robust, effective protest required the expression and experience of pleasure in public. To explore the ideologies, practices, and aesthetics of these activists, I look at the music, dance, fashion, and art they created by examining newspapers, magazines, albums, liner notes, broadsides, documentaries, and photographs, as well as later memoirs and interviews. While countercultural radicals were geographically fragmented and ideologically diverse, they collectively forged an effective, durable fusion of pleasure, performance, and protest between 1965 and 1969.

Additional evidence is presented in support of hypotheses concerning how credibility, threat, & attitude toward blacks contribute to positive & negative evaluations of protest-oriented black student organizations among white U students. The relations between 3 antecedent variables, general attitudes toward blacks, perceived threat, & credibility, & a dependent variable, evaluation of a protest-oriented black student organization, are explored on a U campus in a small Ru community. Data were collected from a random sample of 1,205 white single students living on campus & enrolled at Washington State U in 1969. The results suggest that the indicators of general ethnic attitudes are related, though differentially, to the indicators of credibility & perception of threat, & to negative evaluation of the Black Student Union. Indicators of threat are related to those of credibility, & negative evaluation of the BSU. Multiple-partial r coefficients are employed to evaluate the underlying assumptions in the model. 3 Tables, 1 Figure. R. Lent.

AbstractThis study gives a corpus-assisted discourse study of the representations of 2019 Hong Kong protests in theNew York Times. With the corpus-analytic tools Wmatrix and Wordsmith, it examines both the dominant patterns in its representations and the specific strategies used. The findings suggest that while NYT still draws on the traditional patterns in its representations of Hong Kong protests, it deviates from the protest paradigm in its representations of concerned parties. Meanwhile, emotion discourse has emerged as a distinct strategy in its representations. This is most revealing in the emotion of fear, and a close analysis of its use in its context has revealed its role in the construction of concerned parties and the distrust of Hong Kong people towards the Chinese government.