Unwanted children: Political violence and the cycle of protest in Italy, 1966–1973

Abstract. The article focuses on the cycle of protest that developed in Italy during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some hypotheses on the evolution of the repertoires of action are tested with the aim of explaining the emergence of political violence during a cycle of protest. Newspaper-based data are presented on the proportional presence of violent forms of action, on the social and ideological groups involved in political violence, and on the grievances expressed during violent protests. The widespread political violence that developed in Italy in the early 1970s is explained as an internally differentiated strategic adaptation within the social movement sector, during a cycle of protests that was disorderly but far from violent.     

Protest Voting in Austria, Denmark, and Norway

The article, in part, aims to provide a framework for analysis of the concept of ‘protest voting’. It addresses two empirical questions by use of this framework. First, which parties benefit from protest voting? Second, what are the main objects of political protest which these voters direct their grievances at? Do they protest against the political system, the political elites, or merely certain policies? The empirical analysis, which is based on data from Austria, Denmark, and Norway, suggests that parties that are in opposition, and that have no immediate chance of gaining a government position, are the ones that benefit from protest voting. Political elites are the most common objects of political protest in these countries.     

Naked protest: the maternal politics of citizenship and revolt

This article explores immigrant protest, citizenship and their relationship, through an account of a ‘naked protest’ by a group of mothers, refused asylum seekers and ‘illegal immigrants’ at Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre in England and ends with an account of the use of the ‘naked curse’ in a protest by an indigenous group of mothers against global oil corporations in the Niger Delta. Woven together from activist materials, news reports, interviews, documentaries and historical data, I recount and mobilise these protests to think about ‘the scaling of bodies’ (Marion-Young 1990) and citizenship under neoliberalism, and the routes through which motherhood is mobilised as a site of political agency and resistance to processes of disenfranchisement. I argue that these maternal protests challenge the ‘catastrophic functionalism’ of Agamben-inspired accounts of ‘bare life’, and offer an alternative lens through which to perceive the ethical and political claims made by abject populations (Papadopoulos et al. 2008, p. 198). In thinking through and with these naked protests, this article reframes the sexual politics of citizenship and brings questions of maternity and natality to bear on citizenship studies.     

Foreign Direct Investment,Regime Type,and Labor Protest in Developing Countries

We explore the relationship between FDI, regime type, and strikes in low‐ and middle‐income countries. We argue that FDI produces social tensions and opportunities for protest that can result in higher levels of industrial conflict. However, the effect of FDI is moderated by regime type. While democracies tend to have higher levels of protest overall, they are better able than authoritarian regimes to cope with the strains arising from FDI. We cite two reasons. First, political competition forces regimes to incorporate workers, which shifts conflict from industrial relations to the political arena. Second, democracies provide workers with freedom of association rights, which facilitate institutionalized grievance resolution. We test the argument using a new dataset of labor protest in low‐ and middle‐income countries for the period 1980–2005.     

Ethnic politics and public sector management in Trinidad and Guyana

Representativeness and diversity in public institutions are among the principles of good and democratic governance, but a commitment to achieving ‘balance’ is far easier said than done, particularly in the context of small, ethnically divided societies in which political mobilization is based on ethnic identity. Trinidad and Guyana are two such societies in which political power was held for a long time by a dominant ethnic group and has recently been transferred to the former ‘out group’. Specifically, politics in both territories was dominated by parties that are identified with the urban African populations, whereas the main opposition parties drew their electoral support almost exclusively from rural Indian groups. In both cases the Indian ‘out group’ accused the African ‘in group’ of favouring members of the latter group—and, conversely, of discriminating against the Indians—in the allocation of resources which are in the gift of the state. Also in both countries, democratic elections have resulted in regime changes after three decades of near one‐party rule. The issue of employment in the public service has become critical as the two groups battle for scarce resources, and the public service is described as a ‘theatre of inter‐ethnic drama’. The article takes the view that managing ethnic and cultural diversity is tantamount to managing unproductive tensions that threaten to undermine confidence and morale among public officials. This impacts negatively on their levels of job satisfaction, the quality of the work environment and, ultimately, on performance and output. It breeds suspicion among co‐workers and has the potential to degenerate into ethnic strife that can cripple the public sector and affect the overall goal of national development. The article examines existing legal/constitutional and institutional provisions for conflict management and resolution, but ultimately suggests the need for well‐conceived confidence‐building measures such as public scrutiny of the personnel function and the reintroduction of ethnicity as a category on official government personnel records. The main theoretical conclusion is that while equality of opportunity must be guaranteed, the notion of a representative bureaucracy has many practical limitations that make it unworkable in Trinidad and Guyana. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Democratization and Violent Conflict: Is There A Scandinavian Exception?

The notion that the paths to democracy in Scandinavia were exceptionally peaceful remains a popular argument, but an equally large number of studies opposes this view. This research note provides the first systematic attempt to compare records of violence during democratization in Scandinavia with other regions and countries. By using Varieties of Democracy data, I construct novel measures of democratization and violent conflict that align with extant propositions on Scandinavian exceptionalism and conflict‐democratization research while appreciating multiple dimensions of democratization for a global sample of countries from 1789 to 2018. The results show stable support for a substantial Scandinavian exception of peaceful democratization, but only evidently so for moves toward greater executive constraints and civil and political liberties. The exception is less clear for democratization considering competitive elections and suffrage. On this basis, I propose that we may improve the understanding of the causes of Scandinavian democratic exceptionalism and democratic sustainability more generally by studying the origins of peaceful democratization in Scandinavia compared with Western Europe in the ‘age of liberalization’ from approx. the mid‐eighteenth to the mid‐nineteenth century.     

Who would vote NOTA? Explaining a ‘none of the above’ choice in eight countries

In this study, we investigate who would vote ‘none of the above’ (NOTA) if this were available on the ballot paper using original data from eight European countries. In particular, we examine whether NOTA would be used by abstainers and voters to protest within the electoral process. We also test whether socioeconomic factors and specific and diffuse support for democracy and its institutions correlate with a NOTA vote. We find that having NOTA on the ballot would reduce invalid balloting more than abstention and much more than protest party voting. Our results also suggest that NOTA is related to socioeconomic status, political interest, political knowledge and distrust in political institutions and authorities, but not to broadly undemocratic attitudes. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the increasingly large amounts of abstention and invalid voting, as well as the growing distrust of political institutions, in democratic countries. They also hold lessons for electoral reformers.     

State of the Field

Although scholars of West European politics have long debated whether the region's highly institutionalised party systems were becoming de‐aligned and electorally unstable, the political fallout from the post‐2008 financial crisis has lent a new sense of urgency to the debate. The threats posed to party systems by economic crises are hardly unique to Europe, however. The Latin American experience with the debt crisis of the 1980s and 1990s suggests that party system upheaval was not simply a function of retrospective economic voting during the period of crisis. It was also attributable to programmatically de‐aligning policy responses to crises – namely the ‘bait‐and‐switch’ imposition of austerity and adjustment measures by labour‐based, left‐leaning parties that were traditional champions of statist and redistributive policies. Such patterns of reform made it difficult for party systems to channel societal resistance to market orthodoxy in the post‐adjustment era, setting the stage for convulsive ‘reactive sequences’ when such resistance arose outside and against mainstream parties through varied forms of social and electoral protest, typically on the left flank. This article explores the political fallout from the European and Latin American economic crises from a comparative perspective, arguing that it is essential to think beyond the short‐term political dynamics of crisis management to consider the longer‐term institutional legacies and fragilities of the different political alignments forged around crisis‐induced policy reforms.     

When the slaves go marching out: indignatio,invisible bodies,and political theory

In January 2010, hundreds of illegal migrants took to the streets of Rosarno in Italy for a violent protest against the acts of racism which they had routinely suffered. A collective subject, considered invisible, dared to revolt. These migrants are an anomaly in the social, legal, and political senses. Their revolt is an example of rebellions who constitute a litmus test for the discourse of citizenship; it reveals itself as a form of political subjectivity and highlights the corporeality of the conflict. Understanding the revolt also troubles the boundary between body discourses and traditional political theory. In this paper, I analyse the revolt through categories of contemporary political theory such as the ‘bare life’ of Giorgio Agamben, and the ‘disagreement’ of Jacques Rancière. I show how these categories only partially help to interpret the phenomenon of this uprising. However, the Spinozist concept of indignatio is a more useful intellectual tool to interpret and understand the phenomenon of the revolt of Rosarno.     

Impossible protest: noborders in Calais

Since the closure of the Red Cross refugee reception centre in Sangatte, undocumented migrants in Calais hoping to cross the border to Britain have been forced to take refuge in a number of squatted migrant camps, locally known by all as ‘the jungles.’ Unauthorised shanty-like residences built by the migrants themselves, living conditions in the camps are very poor. In June 2009, European ‘noborder’ activists set up a week-long protest camp in the area with the intention of confronting the authorities over their treatment of undocumented migrants. In this article, we analyse the June 2009 noborder camp as an instance of ‘immigrant protest.’ Drawing on ethnographic materials and Jacques Rancière's work on politics and aesthetics, we construct a typology of forms of border control through which to analyse the different ways in which the politics of the noborder camp were staged, performed and policed. Developing a critique of policing practices which threatened to make immigrant protest ‘impossible’, we highlight moments of protest which, through the affirmation of an ‘axiomatic’ equality, disrupted and disarticulated the borders between citizens and non-citizens, the political and non-political.     

Labour market risks and political preferences: The case of temporary employment

The political economy literature has gathered compelling evidence that labour market risks shape political preferences. Accordingly, insecurity fuels support for redistribution and left parties. This article analyses this argument for temporary workers, a so far neglected risk category which has increased dramatically in the past two decades. Temporary workers also have been in the focus of recent insider‐outsider debates. Some authors in this line of research have argued that temporary work leads to political disenchantment – for example, non‐instrumental responses such as vote abstention or protest voting. This contradicts risk‐based explanations of political preferences. The article discusses both theoretical perspectives and derives conflicting hypotheses for the empirical analysis of temporary workers' policy and party preferences. The review reveals considerable ambiguity regarding the questions which parties temporary workers can be expected to support and what the underlying motives for party choice are. Synthesising arguments from both perspectives, the article proposes an alternative argument according to which temporary workers are expected to support the ‘new’ left – that is, green and other left‐libertarian parties. It is argued that this party family combines redistributive policies with outsider‐friendly policy design. Using individual‐level data from the European Social Survey for 15 European countries, the article supports this argument by showing that temporary, compared to permanent, workers exhibit higher demand for redistribution and stronger support for the new left. Neither the risk‐based nor the insider‐outsider explanations receive full support. In particular, no signs of political disenchantment of temporary workers can be found. Thus, the findings challenge central claims of the insider‐outsider literature.     

Race,Islamophobia and the politics of citizenship in post-unification Germany

ABSTRACT

In the immediate aftermath of German reunification, as in the wake of the recent humanitarian crisis, Germany experienced notable ‘peaks’ of racist agitation and violence. In the 1990s, as today, the post-Communist eastern regions of Germany tend to be perceived as the hub of such racism. In this article, Lewicki revisits both ‘peaks’ via an examination of numerical evidence for verbal and physical racist violence in the former East and West of Germany. Rather than conceiving of racism as ‘cyclical’ or a specific legacy of the Communist dictatorship, her analysis suggests that political projects in Germany’s past and present have retained distinct structural incarnations of race. Far-right activists could thus successfully channel animosities resulting from the terms of unification into nationalist and racist resentment: momentarily more so in the East, but increasingly also in the West. The politics of citizenship, Lewicki argues, has provided a key means of perpetuating, reaffirming and cementing racialized hierarchies in the two post-war German states, but also in reunified Germany.     

How Governments Shape the Risk of Civil Violence: India's Federal Reorganization, 1950–56

Governments are absent from empirical studies of civil violence, except as static sources of grievance. The influence that government policy accommodations and threats of repression have on internal violence is difficult to verify without a means to identify potential militancy that did not happen. I use a within‐country research design to address this problem. During India's reorganization as a linguistic federation, every language group could have sought a state. I show that representation in the ruling party conditioned the likelihood of a violent statehood movement. Prostatehood groups that were politically advantaged over the interests opposed to them were peacefully accommodated. Statehood movements similar in political importance to their opponents used violence. Very politically disadvantaged groups refrained from mobilization, anticipating repression. These results call into question the search for a monotonic relationship between grievances and violence and the omission of domestic politics from prominent theories of civil conflict.     

National protest agenda and the dimensionality of party politics: Evidence from four East-Central European democracies

Contemporary democracies show considerable differences in the issue composition of their protest politics, which tends to remain relatively stable over time. In countries like Germany or the Czech Republic, the vast majority of protests have been mobilised around sociocultural issues, such as human rights, peace, nuclear power or the environment, and only a tiny portion of protest has focused on economic issues. At the opposite extreme, protest in France or Poland usually has a strongly economic character and voices demands relating to material redistribution and social policy. What lies behind the cross-country differences in national protest agendas? In this article, 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 that there is 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 type 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, the national protest agendas in four countries are examined. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia show four combinations of two crucial factors that are not available in the old 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. The results show that in the Czech Republic, where the master-issue dimension has remained strongly economic, protest has been predominantly sociocultural. In Poland between 1993 and 2001 and Hungary between 1993 and 2006, the master-issue dimensions are strongly sociocultural, while protest is predominantly economic. There is no single-dimension equilibrium in party politics in Slovakia or in post-2001 Poland and mainstream parties compete on both economic and sociocultural issues. Consequently, the substitutive dynamics between party and protest politics is weaker and the issue agendas in party and protest arenas are here more alike.     

‘Better in kung fu movies than in political parties’: Labour’s Factionalism and a Reappraisal of Eric Hobsbawm’s Political Thought

Eric Hobsbawm will forever be a giant intellectual figure. Yet, an aspect of his work is underappreciated—the case for a more pluralistic, dynamic and intellectually inquiring Labour Party. As such, his political thought is particularly relevant given the recent election of Keir Starmer, and the avowed quest for ‘unity’ in bringing Labour back to power. Hobsbawm came to believe that political strategies which sought to exploit social and political stratification and conflict—such as vilifying reformist political movements and those of moderate persuasion—doomed Labour to permanent opposition. A broad-based people’s party, uniting objectives of solidarity and aspiration, was the only viable class politics. Although from the Marxist tradition, Hobsbawm believed Labour’s purpose was to make liberal democracy function more effectively, rather than creating an alternative economic and political system. Suggesting conflict was more suited to kung fu movies, Hobsbawm’s predominant theme of ‘anti-factionalism with a purpose’ remains apposite today.     

Different worlds of contention? Protest in Northwestern,Southern and Eastern Europe

Despite the voluminous literature on the ‘normalisation of protest’, the protest arena is seen as a bastion of left-wing mobilisation. While citizens on the left readily turn to the streets, citizens on the right only settle for it as a ‘second best option’. However, most studies are based on aggregated cross-national comparisons or only include Northwestern Europe. We contend the aggregate-level perspective hides different dynamics of protest across Europe. Based on individual-level data from the European Social Survey (2002–2016), we investigate the relationship between ideology and protest as a key component of the normalisation of protest. Using hierarchical logistic regression models, we show that while protest is becoming more common, citizens with different ideological views are not equal in their protest participation across the three European regions. Instead of a general left predominance, we find that in Eastern European countries, right-wing citizens are more likely to protest than those on the left. In Northwestern and Southern European countries, we find the reverse relationship, left-wing citizens are more likely to protest than their right-wing counterparts. Lessons drawn from the protest experience in Northwestern Europe characterised by historical mobilisation by the New Left are of limited use for explaining the ideological composition of protest in the Southern and Eastern European countries. We identify historical and contemporary regime access as the mechanism underlying regional patterns: citizens with ideological views that were historically in opposition are more likely to protest. In terms of contemporary regime access, we find that partisanship enhances the effect of ideology, while ideological distance from the government has a different effect in the three regions. As protest gains in importance as a form of participation, the paper contributes to our understanding of regional divergence in the extent to which citizens with varying ideological views use this tool.     

Explaining right‐wing terrorism and violence in Western Europe: Grievances,opportunities and polarisation

What explains cross‐national variation of right‐wing terrorism and violence (RTV)? This question remains largely unanswered in existing research on the extreme right because (1) events data suitable for cross‐national comparisons have been lacking, and (2) existing analyses fail to capture RTV's causal complexity, which involve multiple causal paths (equifinality) comprising causal conditions that become sufficient for the outcome only in combination (conjunctural causation). To help fill these gaps, this article uses new events data in a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) research design, aiming to explain variation in the extent of RTV in 18 West European countries between 1990 and 2015. In doing so, the article identifies two ‘causal recipes’ that consistently distinguish countries with extensive RTV experience from those with low or moderate RTV experience. The first (North European) recipe involves the combination of high immigration, low electoral support for anti‐immigration (radical right) parties, and extensive public repression of radical right actors and opinions. The second (South European) recipe involves the combination of socioeconomic hardship, authoritarian legacies, and extensive left‐wing terrorism and militancy. Notably, both recipes contain elements of ‘grievances’ and ‘opportunities’, suggesting that these two theories, which are conventionally seen as contrasting, may be more fruitfully seen as complementary. Furthermore, a highly polarised conflict between far right activists and their enemies represents a third necessary condition for extensive RTV to occur. The article concludes by highlighting the paradox that countermeasures intended to constrain radical right politics appear to fuel extreme right violence, while countermeasures that may constrain extreme right violence would imply an advancement of radical right politics.     

The Iliad: A Song of Political Protest*

Since protest poetry is considered a voice on behalf of victims of war and the oppressed, an epic poem such as the Iliad, which appears to celebrate a culture of male violence, is an unlikely example of protest poetry. This epic story of Achilles, however, brings to the forefront several themes of protest poetry: challenge to authority, anger at injustice, and confrontation with the fragility of the human condition. Even the form of epic as a product of oral culture reflects traditional protest song. Specifically, this article argues that revisiting the themes of protest in the Iliad provides insights into why human beings protest, connects political poetry to philosophic questions, and highlights the human being as a perennial protester who must face the inevitable choice of safety or perilous political action.     

Economic grievances and political protest

How do economic grievances affect citizens’ inclination to protest? Given rising levels of inequality and widespread economic hardship in the aftermath of the Great Recession, this question is crucial for political science: if adverse economic conditions depress citizens’ engagement, as many contributions have argued, then the economic crisis may well feed into a crisis of democracy. However, the existing research on the link between economic grievances and political participation remains empirically inconclusive. It is argued in this article that this is due to two distinct shortcomings, which are effectively addressed by combining the strengths of political economy and social movement theories. Based on ESS and EU-SILC data from 2006–2012, as well as newly collected data on political protest in 28 European countries, a novel, more fine-grained conceptualisation of objective economic grievances considerably improves our understanding of the direct link between economic grievances and protest behaviour. While structural economic disadvantage (i.e., the level of grievances) unambiguously de-mobilises individuals, the deterioration of economic prospects (i.e., a change in grievances) instead increases political activity. Revealing these two countervailing effects provides an important clarification that helps reconcile many seemingly conflicting findings in the existing literature. Second, the article shows that the level of political mobilisation substantially moderates this direct link between individual hardship and political activity. In a strongly mobilised environment, even structural economic disadvantage is no longer an impediment to political participation. There is a strong political message in this interacting factor: if the presence of organised and visible political action is a decisive signal for citizens that conditions the micro-level link between economic grievances and protest, then democracy itself – that is, organised collective action – can help sustain political equality and prevent the vicious circle of democratic erosion.     

The ‘Sarcee War’: Fragmented Citizenship and the City

In 1880, the Tsuu T'ina Nation (then the Sarcee band) staged a small, armed protest known as the ‘Sarcee War’, in Calgary, Alberta, to demand food and a separate reserve from the Siksika, with whom they had been assigned land. This paper argues that this protest reveals the material and political roots of Aboriginal citizenship: a fragmented and differentiated political body, unified through contingent agreements. The Tsuu T'ina actions, the choice of location and their specific demands reveal an assertion of rights that differ from the ‘standard’ idea of Canadian citizenship (then and now) and articulate a complex process of ‘othering’ and belonging.