Observing protest: media use and student involvement on 7 April 2010 in Bishkek,Kyrgyzstan

Individuals in and around protests are generally classified as either participants or nonparticipants. However, observers witnessing protests can also play an important role in collective actions by sharing their experiences. This paper explores the characteristics of observers during the 7 April 2010 demonstrations in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Based on data collected via a survey of university students, I demonstrate that protest observers differed from nonparticipants on a range of variables. A key factor differentiating student observers from nonparticipants was their online activity prior to the protests. Logistic regressions show that students with higher rates of online activity were significantly and substantially more likely to be protest observers than nonparticipants. These findings provide empirical evidence for categorizing observation as a distinct level of protest involvement, shed light on the demonstration in Bishkek on 7 April 2010, and suggest that examining online activity can contribute to a better understanding of protest involvement levels.     

Anti-Iraq War Protests in Turkey: Global Networks,Coalitions, and Context

This article examines how Turkish citizens participated in protests against the Iraq War and why civil society organizations were able to mobilize tens of thousands of people across the country despite the institutional weakness of the Turkish peace movement. The Iraq War case is important in that its scale and level of protest mobilization were unprecedented based on any other anti-war protests in Turkey. Using content analysis of newspaper reports of anti-Iraq War protest events, this article maps the patterns and forms of protest against the Iraq War and argues for the importance of global networks, coalitions among organizations, and political context for protest mobilization.     

How do MPs in Kosovo develop constituency links? A comparison of MPs’ behaviour under closed-list and open-list PR electoral systems

While studies among established democracies suggest MPs’ incentives to develop close links with their constituents are hardly determined by the electoral system, very little is known about MPs’ incentives to establish such links outside these countries. Looking at the case of Kosovo, as a newly democratic country with a low level of party system institutionalization, this article examines the extent to which its MPs develop close links with their constituents. Through interviews, the article compares MPs’ behaviour under closed-list PR system which was used in the 2004 elections and open-list PR system which was used both in the 2007 and 2010 elections. The main argument is that due to the weak nature of the party system institutionalization, MPs elected under open-list PR system, where there is intra-party electoral competition, will develop closer links with their constituents than those elected under closed-list PR, where such intra-party electoral competition is absent.     

The ‘ballot and the brick’: protest,voting and non-voting in post-apartheid South Africa

Over the last decade, protest has become an enduring feature of the post-apartheid political landscape. Despite this wave of protest, the African National Congress (ANC) has largely retained its dominant status. The endurance of the ANC’s electoral support in spite of the high levels of protest has led Susan Booysen to conclude that protests in South Africa form part of a ‘dual repertoire’ of political contestation. She argues that protests are used to signal grievances to the ANC between elections but that, ultimately, people remain loyal to the party of liberation. This article interrogates Booysen’s claim through advancing an analysis of voting district and ward-level data in protest hotspots. The article highlights weaknesses in the methodological base of Booysen’s thesis. By analysing the support for the ANC amongst the estimated eligible voting-age population, this article suggests a different relationship between voting and protesting in post-apartheid South Africa.     

Before the window closed: internationalism,crossing borders,and reaching out to sisters across the seas

Abstract

This article puts into conversation existent and new scholarship regarding black radical women of the Left in the United States and South Africa during the twentieth century. It is primarily concerned with the evolution of women’s protest from localized issues of race-based discrimination to international, anti-colonial protests of the era. It is a timely response to contemporary historical analyses that emphasize the necessity of broadening historical concepts to include themes that cross traditional chronological, ideological, and geographical lines. This article posits four women whose ideological and organizational connections extended far beyond their own national borders and helped to change contemporary ideas regarding the supposed place of black women in national and international protests. The article illustrates the high level of awareness and commonality between communities in protest, and speaks directly to the conflicting intersections of gender, race, and protest that traversed both ideological and geographical divides.     

Ritual Demonstrations versus Reactive Protests: Participation Across Mobilizing Contexts in Mexico City

Using an innovative survey of protest participants and nonparticipants from five major street demonstrations in Mexico City in 2011 and 2012, this study tests the assumption that influences on protest participation vary across different types of events; namely, ritual demonstrations and reactive protests. The comparison is based on two assumptions: that these are two of the dominant forms of protest in contemporary Latin America, and that specifying the context for different types of social movement participation provides a better understanding of the individual mobilization process for groups seeking to defend their rights or gain new benefits. The comparative analyses reveal some crucial differences. Political interest and previous political experience are more influential in the decision to take part in reactive demonstrations. For ritual demonstrations, the decision to participate tends to be driven more by personal and organizational connections.     

Student Protest and the Nueva Mayoría Reforms in Chile

Chile's Nueva Mayoría government (2014–2018) responded more forcefully to student demands for a more assertive public role in education than any of its post‐authoritarian predecessors. Existing scholarship suggests that this change reflected the success of the 2011 student protests in tapping into latent public discontent with neoliberalism and the politics of consensus. This article argues that it is also crucial to understand how the wave of protest interacted with the dynamics of party politics at the elite level. Public support translated into substantive policy and institutional changes because it contributed to a coalition and platform shift that favoured more extensive reform.     

Explaining Electoral Volatility in Latin America: Evidence at the Party Level

Many existing explanations of electoral volatility have been tested at the country level, but they are largely untested at the individual party level. This study reexamines theories of electoral volatility through the use of multilevel models on party‐level data in the lower house elections of 18 Latin American countries from 1978 to 2012. Testing hypotheses at different levels, it finds that irregular institutional alteration increases electoral volatility for all the parties in a country, but the effect is more significant for the presidential party. At the party level, the results show that while a party that is more ideologically distinctive than other parties tends to experience lower electoral volatility, party age is not a statistically significant factor for explaining party volatility.     

Protest Politics in a Changing Political Context: Switzerland, 1975–2005

This article analyses if and how recent changes within the Swiss political system have influenced different aspects of protest politics (e.g. level, issues, action repertoires, and transnationalization). We argue that opportunities for mobilization have emerged in recent years due to changes in the institutionalized political context and that these changes have at least partially led to a resurgence of protest activities in the early 2000s. In a longitudinal perspective, it is however rather moderate. Additionally, new social movements still dominate Swiss protest politics. Although social and migration‐related questions gained in salience, the changes are not as dramatic as in the case of party politics. The rise of a new integration‐demarcation cleavage has not (yet) shaken Swiss protest politics as heavily as Swiss party politics. Finally, even though they are not integrated into a pronounced new protest cycle, the early 2000s are marked by the global justice movement. In this context, we observe a slight radicalization of the action repertoire and police reactions, which is at least partially explained by the emergence of new “transnational” sites of contention.     

Resistance to Privatization: Why Protest Movements Succeed and Fail in Latin America

Why do some protest movements in Latin America succeed in rolling back privatizations while others fail? This article argues that protests against privatizations have tended to succeed under two conditions. First, privatization's opponents form linkages (or “brokerage”) across multiple sectors of society. Broad coalitions are more likely to achieve their goals, while groups acting alone, such as labor unions, are more easily defeated or ignored by governments. Second, civil rights are protected but political representation is weak. In that case, opponents have the legal right to protest, but are unlikely to have opportunities for communicating their concerns through formal institutions, which prompts them to channel their demands outside of existing political institutions. Using case examples and logistic regression, this study confirms these arguments and discusses the implications for democracy in the region.     

The prostitute

Migrant domestic workers rarely take part in — let alone organize — public protests in the countries where they work. Public protests are virtually unheard of among migrant domestic workers in Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia, and especially in the Middle East and the Gulf States. Over the past decade and a half, however, migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong — mostly Filipinas and Indonesian women — have become highly active, organizing and participating in political protests. Hong Kong's migrant domestic workers protest in a place where they are guest workers and temporary migrants, denied the opportunity of becoming legal citizens or permanent residents. Increasingly, these workers, their grassroots activist organizations, and the nongovernmental organizations with which they are affiliated frame their concerns in terms of global, transnational, and human rights, not merely local migrant worker rights. This article takes the “Consulate Hopping Protest and Hall of Shame Awards” event — part of the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Hong Kong in 2005 — as an ethnographic example of domestic worker protest and as an entrée through which to ask what it is about Hong Kong and about the position of women migrant workers — whose mobility and voice is both a product and a symptom of globalization — that literally permits public protests and shapes their form and content. The article illustrates how migrant workers’ protests and activism have been shaped by domestic worker subjectivities, by the dynamics of inter-ethnic worker affiliations, and by the sociohistorical context of Hong Kong as a post-colonial “global city” and a “neoliberal space of exception.”     

Theoretische Überlegungen zur Entstehung von Gewalt in Protesten: Eine situative mechanismische Erklärung

This paper connects recent findings in sociology, criminology, social psychology and neurosciences to develop a mechanism-based explanation of the emergence of protest violence. The theoretical considerations connect Charles Tilly’s and Sidney Tarrow’s relational sociology with Randall Collins’ emotions-based micro-sociology of violent confrontations and Herbert Blumer’s symbolic interactionism. The goal is to contribute to the development of a mid-range theory that can explain the emergence of violence in generally peaceful protests conclusively and that is empirically verifiable. The paper assumes that instead of protesters’ or police officers’ motivations and strategies, three situational factors are crucial for the emergence of violence in protests: interaction, emotion and interpretation during the protest event. Due to actors’ situational interpretation specific combinations of interactions form relational processes that trigger emotional mechanism of “tension and fear”, as conceptualized by Collins. Together with “emotional dominance” during the protest, tension and fear forms the emotional process of “attacking the weak” and thereby prompts violence even in protests of generally peaceful protest groups.     

Latin America's Neocaudillismo: Ex‐Presidents and Newcomers Running for President… and Winning

Latin Americans have been voting for a surprisingly large number of ex‐presidents and newcomers in presidential elections since the late 1980s. This article looks at both the demand and supply sides of this phenomenon by focusing on economic anxieties and party crises as the key independent variables. Sometimes the relationship between these variables is linear: economic anxieties combined with party crises lead to rising ex‐presidents and newcomers. At other times the relationship is symbiotic: the rise of ex‐presidents leads to party crises, economic and political anxieties, and thus the rise of newcomers. This article concludes that the abundance of ex‐presidents and newcomers in elections—essentially, the new face of Latin America's caudillismo—does not bode well for democracy because it accelerates de‐institutionalization and polarizes the electorate.     

Answering the “International Call”: Contextualising Sydney Anti-Nuclear and Anti-War Activism in the 1960s

Although recent work on protest in the 1960s has placed organised opposition to the war in Vietnam in a transnational context, there is as yet no history of the Australian anti-nuclear campaigns of the early years of the decade. By examining anti-nuclear activism in 1961 and 1962 in relation to anti-war protest in 1965 and 1966, this paper argues that Sydney activists understood themselves as part of a transnational protest movement well before they began to agitate against military involvement in Vietnam. Lessons learnt while mounting solidarity protests with the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament informed the repertoire of practice that Australian anti-war activists used to mount their protests against the conflict in Indochina.     

Indigenous Parties and Democracy in Latin America

In recent years, important indigenous parties have emerged for the first time in Latin American history. Although some analysts view this development with trepidation, this essay argues that the indigenous parties in Latin America are unlikely to exacerbate ethnic conflict or create the kinds of problems that have been associated with some ethnic parties in other regions. To the contrary, the emergence of major indigenous parties in Latin America may actually help deepen democracy in the region. These parties will certainly improve the representativeness of the party system in the countries where they arise. They should also increase political participation and reduce party system fragmentation and electoral volatility in indigenous areas. They may even increase the acceptance of democracy and reduce political violence in countries with large indigenous populations.     

Citizens,bribery and the propensity to protest

It is widely assumed that the more one experiences corruption the more likely one is to want to protest about it. Yet empirical evidence illustrating this is thin on the ground. This paper fills that gap by focusing on the extent to which self-reported experience of bribery affects the willingness to engage in protests against corruption in Africa. We find that the more one experiences bribery the more one is likely to support anti-corruption protests. A further unexpected finding is that the personal experience of corruption also increases the willingness to rely on bribes to solve public administration problems.     

Chronicle of a Survival Foretold: How Protest Behavior Against Armed Actors Influenced Violence in the Colombian Civil War, 1988–2005

This article examines the circumstances under which civilians, using protests as a mechanism, alter the strategic use of violence by armed actors (rebels and state forces). By examining the civil war in Colombia between 1988 and 2005, this study finds that combatants decrease their attacks against the population when civilians protest against the enemy. Combatants interpret such demonstrations as costly signals of loyalty. Furthermore, when insurgents are the target of the protests, insurgents increase repression against civilians as rebels get stronger. In contrast, state forces (and paramilitaries) compensate for their weakness in the area by multiplying civilian victims. Both state forces and rebels, however, are likely to decrease violence against civilians when civilians protest against both parties in contested zones. In such contexts, armed actors are likely to refrain from retaliation because any violence might drive noncombatants toward the enemy.     

Legislative Parties in Volatile,Nonprogrammatic Party Systems: The Peruvian Case in Comparative Perspective

This article extends the analysis of political parties in electorally volatile and organizationally weak party systems by evaluating two implications centered on legislative voting behavior. First, it examines whether disunity prevails where weakness of programmatic and electoral commonalities abound. Second, it analyzes whether inchoate party systems weaken the ability of government parties to control the congressional agenda. The empirical analysis centers on Peru, a classic example of a weakly institutionalized party system, and how its legislative parties compare to those of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and the United States. The results lend support to the view that lower unity characterizes weakly institutionalized settings. The agenda‐setting power of government parties, however, appears to be influenced more by the majority status of the government than by the level of party system institutionalization.     

Social Protest and Nationalism in Western Sahara: Struggles around Fisheries and Housing in El Ayun and Dakhla

The Gdeim Izik protest emerged in response to Moroccan public policy (the distribution of land for construction) and adopted a nationalist line during the course of the action, provoking a heavy-handed response from Moroccan state security forces. This paper analyses the process and places it in the broader context of protest movements that emerge in situations of occupation and authoritarian rule. To that end, the study addresses the reconfiguration of the protest camp in Western Sahara during the 2000s, including protests that were not explicitly pro-independence struggles, to examine how Sahrawi protest actors perceived and assessed this context and how this assessment influenced their individual and collective action strategies.