Protest, Hardship, and Democracy (PHD)

• Applicant: Katerina Vrablikova, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Political Science ; Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2016 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 298751218

The extensive mobilizations of anti-austerity and Occupy movements have recently became a remarkable political force in contemporary democracies. This type of political activism is distinct from protest we have seen so far in Western democracies. Ordinarily it has usually been people of higher socioeconomic status residing in wealthier countries who have protested substantially more. However, the anti-austerity protests or generally political activism of socioeconomically deprived groups, such as unemployed or immigrants, suggest that under specific conditions socioeconomic hardship can activate people to get involved in protest. Curiously, we know very little about this type of political activism so far. Therefore the goal of this research project is to provide an empirically based study of protest under socioeconomic hardship and thus significantly contribute to the discussion on its implications for the prospects of representative democracies. Specifically, the project focuses on two puzzles: 1. What are the conditions that trigger protest under hardship? The project will develop an original explanatory theory determining how a combination of macro-structural and individual-level socioeconomic hardship activates people to get involved in protest. 2. Which democratic values are brought into politics by socioeconomically deprived protestors? The project will elaborate particularly the consequentialist interpretation of political representation in the light of socioeconomic equality in politics. To empirically examine the two puzzles, the project will apply mixed research methods. In the first step, the project will qualitatively analyze eight country socioeconomic contexts combined with individual-level quantitative analyses of existing case-control surveys of protestors to further develop the multi-level explanatory theory. In the second step, the analysis will test the combined effect of macro-structural and individual-level socioeconomic hardship on individual protest using existing repeated cross-country surveys of individuals extended with macro-structural indicators. In the third step, I will carry out a more detailed exploration of micro-level relationships in two new case-control surveys of protestors taking place in two country contexts selected on the basis of the results on key macro-level factors gained in the second steps of the analysis. In the fourth step, the project will compare democratic values and political preferences of socioeconomically deprived protestors and participants of protests under hardship to other (well-off) protestors and the general population. The results will be published in three journal articles and will significantly contribute to our understanding of political integration of socioeconomically deprived people.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professor Craig Jenkins, Ph.D.