The Great Recession of 2008 created a political opportunity for the mobilisation of various social groups, especially those most affected by the crisis. However, the two largest protest waves in ...Serbia - Against Dictatorship and One of Five Million, did not articulate economic grievances as the most pressing. The main question is why economic demands were so weakly expressed during these protests. Our contention is that the protesters' predominantly middle-class backgrounds and a lack of class solidarity hampered the framing of popular discontent in economic terms. The analysis here is based on surveys of the protest participants.
Worldwide, it is not uncommon to observe violent police reactions against social movements. These are often rationalized by decision makers as efficient ways to contain violence from protesters. In ...France for instance, the ongoing Yellow Vests protests have generated an unprecedented number of casualties, injuries, and convictions among protesters. But was this response efficient in diminishing violence stemming from the Yellow Vests? To this day, little is known about the psychological consequences of police violence in the context of protests. Combining insights from Significance Quest Theory and the Social Identity perspective on collective action, we predicted that exposure to police violence could “backfire” and lead to increased radicalization of protesters. A cross-sectional investigation of 523 Yellow Vests yielded evidence for this hypothesis. We found positive direct effects of exposure to police violence on intentions to attend future demonstrations and to self-sacrifice for the Yellow Vests. Moreover, these effects were serially mediated by perceived Loss of Significance and Identification with the Yellow Vests. Paradoxically, these results highlight for the first time the mechanism through which political repression may contribute to the formation of radical politicized identities. Thus, we recommend that decision makers privilege the use of de-escalation techniques in protest policing whenever possible.
Does support for the January 6th insurrection come mostly from concerned citizens worried over illegal voting, or from racists spurred to action by the highly visible Black Lives Matter protests and ...Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat? We field a survey experiment aimed at disentangling links between old and new racial grievances, anti-immigrant beliefs, Black activism, and support for the January 6th insurrection. We find that the people most likely to be supportive of the insurrection are whites who hold negative attitudes toward immigrants and subscribe to white replacement theory. Beliefs about the George Floyd protests also explain January 6th support, above and beyond demographics and other racial and political views. These results are validated by the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey. We also conduct a survey vignette experiment and find that anti-BLM rhetoric spread by Trump and right-wing news sources likely soured opinions on the movement and set the stage for widespread insurrection support.
This study reports a comprehensive empirical investigation of the nature and correlates of anti-mask attitudes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Accumulating evidence underscores the importance of ...facemasks, as worn by the general public, in limiting the spread of infection. Accordingly, mask wearing has become increasingly mandatory in public places such as stores and on public transit. Although the public has been generally adherent to mask wearing, a small but vocal group of individuals refuse to wear masks. Anti-mask protest rallies have occurred in many places throughout the world, sometimes erupting violently. Few empirical studies have examined the relationship between anti-mask attitudes and mask non-adherence and little is known about how such attitudes relate to one another or other factors (e.g., non-adherence to social distancing, anti-vaccination attitudes). To investigate these issues, the present study surveyed 2,078 adults from the US and Canada. Consistent with other surveys, we found that most (84%) people wore masks because of COVID-19. The 16% who did not wear masks scored higher on most measures of negative attitudes towards masks. Network analyses indicated that negative attitudes about masks formed an intercorrelated network, with the central nodes in the network being (a) beliefs that masks are ineffective in preventing COVID-19, and (b) psychological reactance (PR; i.e., an aversion to being forced to wear masks). These central nodes served as links, connecting the network of anti-masks attitudes to negative attitudes toward SARSCoV2 vaccination, beliefs that the threat of COVID-19 has been exaggerated, disregard for social distancing, and political conservatism. Findings regarding PR are important because, theoretically, PR is likely to strengthen other anti-masks attitudes (e.g., beliefs that masks are ineffective) because people with strong PR react with anger and counter-arguments when their beliefs are challenged, thereby leading to a strengthening of their anti-mask beliefs. Implications for improving mask adherence are discussed.
On the ‘Doing’ of ‘Something’ Paavolainen, Teemu
Performance research,
05/2022, Volume:
27, Issue:
3-4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Starting off from its conflicting range of connotations – from the pejorative to the efficacious – the essay sets out to defend the notion of ‘performative protest’ as more than just ‘playing ...politics’, or protesting with explicitly performance-like elements. Instead, a more plural model of performativity is proposed, which would equally incorporate the more positive and negative conceptions of active subversion and passive submission, effective doing and theatrical dissimulation. Drawing on Judith Butler but much influenced by the radical theorists David Graeber, Max Haiven, and John Holloway, the proposed dynamic is straightforward enough to be illustrated in a simple figure: people do something, and it begins to look like some thing (think of verbs and nouns). If protest is about ‘doing something’ about some perceived injustice, then the performativity of protest concerns the various ways that doing and that something relate.On this theoretical basis, the middle section focuses on the plurality of performative protest, or in Haiven’s and Holloway’s terms, of the doing and the done. Beyond typical protest, the section points to the kinds of weak resistance that people already perform in everyday life – the ways that protest persists in resistant environments – as well as to more prefigurative work and the openness of any long-term consequences. The final section then returns to the duality of performative making and maintaining, related now to Graeber’s intriguing take on imagination and violence as the central competing norms for the very performance of social reality. (Incidentally, he would also dub these the core ‘political ontologies’ of the historical Left and Right.) Given the essay’s fairly theoretical nature, the examples remain fleeting and cartoonish, but cover a wide spectrum from anti-maskers and truck convoys to protest clowns and giant puppets; at the end, the themes covered are summed up in another loose figure.
Banners and Memes Kampka, Agnieszka
Performance research,
05/2022, Volume:
27, Issue:
3-4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article compares two waves of protests that have taken place in Poland: one related to the reform of the judicial system (2015) and the other to the decision of the Constitutional Tribunal that ...limited the right to abortion (2020). The analysis of banners, memes and photos documents new forms of expression of civic dissent and a generational shift in the visual rhetoric of citizenship. The analysis reveals the persistence of specific cultural and political patterns and new forms of protest resulting from different sources of collective imagination and oppositional readings of national myths and symbols. The juxtaposition of the visuals from 2015 and 2020 shows fundamental differences in using history and popular culture motifs in slogans and memes expressing the collective identity of the protesters. In 2015 conflict concerned specific legal solutions, and in 2020 displayed deep generational, gender and cultural disagreement. Concepts of social performances and deliberative democracy explain how demonstrations reflect the transformation of the Polish public sphere.
When and how do third-party actors—most prominently electoral commissions, courts, and observers—contribute to the integrity of the electoral process? We approach these questions by studying how ...third-party actors shape politicians’ incentives to comply with the outcomes of elections. Third parties are most beneficial in close elections, when the threat of a post-election confrontation alone fails to ensure self-enforcing compliance with election outcomes. Our analysis highlights that third parties do not need to be impartial to be politically consequential, that it is third parties with a moderate pro-incumbent bias that will be acceptable to not only the opposition but also the incumbent, and that incumbents adopt politically consequential third-party institutions when they fear that their narrow victory might result in a costly post-election confrontation. Extensions of our model address the role of repression and urban bias, examine the differences between commissions, courts, and observers, and clarify not only the potential but also the limits to institutional solutions to the problem of electoral compliance in new and transitioning democracies.
Петр Вячеславович Бизюков – ассоциированный научный сотрудник, Институт социологии РАН; Социологический институт РАН – филиал Федерального научно-исследовательского социологического центра Российской ...академии наук. Адрес: 190005, Санкт-Петербург, ул. 7-я Красноармейская, д. 25/14. E-mail: petersk@yandex.ru
Цитирование: Бизюков П.В. (2019) Трудовые протесты в России: территориальная и отраслевая локализация в 2008–2016 гг. // Мир России. Т. 28. № 1. С. 75–100. DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2019-28-1-75-100
Статья посвящена распространению трудовых протестов в географическом и экономическом пространствах. В ее основе лежат данные Мониторинга трудовых протестов, начатого в Центре социально-трудовых прав в 2008 г. В статье описывается методика Мониторинга, в соответствии с которой трудовые протесты – это публичные конфликты, используемые работниками для защиты своих интересов. В тексте перечисляются основные показатели, которые фиксируются по каждой акции. Количество трудовых протестов за 108 месяцев наблюдений (с января 2008 г. до декабря 2016 г.) увеличилось более чем в три раза. Всего в базу данных Мониторинга включена информация о 2516 протестах. В начале рассматривается динамика изменения количества протестов по годам, нарастающая на протяжении всего периода наблюдений. Для того чтобы дать количественную оценку числа протестных акций в России, производится сравнение с двумя странами – Грузией и Кыргызстаном, где с 2016 г. ведется сбор данных по методике Мониторинга.
Главный фокус статьи – это распределение протестов по регионам и отраслям. На основании данных о числе акций по регионам делается вывод о том, что их распространенность близка к возможному максимуму, а среднее количество протестов, приходящееся на один регион, постоянно увеличивается. Отраслевая структура акций значительно изменилась: за последние годы выступления работников стали чаще происходить в отраслях, где превалирует неформальная занятость, где нет профсоюзов, т.е. там, где отсутствуют или слабо развиты институциональные механизмы регулирования трудовых отношений. И наоборот, доля протестов в промышленности, на крупных предприятиях уменьшилась, и данные Мониторинга показывают, что в промышленном секторе экономики в регулировании трудовых отношений, а значит, и конфликтов, активное участие принимают профсоюзы. Снижение числа протестов в промышленных отраслях приводит к сокращению включенности профсоюзов в протесты. При этом нарастает число стихийных акций в отраслях, где профсоюзов нет или они слабы (бюджетные отрасли). Это позволяет сделать вывод о том, что профсоюзы, опираясь на право и механизмы социального партнерства, т.е. на институциональные регуляторы, смогли снизить уровень напряженности, а там, где их нет, уровень конфликтности повысился.
During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments across the globe implemented severe restrictions of civic freedoms to contain the spread of the virus. The global health emergency posed ...the risk of governments seizing the pandemic as a window of opportunity to curb (potential) challenges to their power, thereby reinforcing the ongoing, worldwide trend of shrinking civic spaces. In this article, we investigate whether and how governments used the pandemic as a justification to impose restrictions of freedom of expression. Drawing on the scholarship on the causes of civic space restrictions, we argue that governments responded to COVID-19 by curtailing the freedom of expression when they had faced significant contentious political challenges before the pandemic. Our results from a quantitative analysis indeed show that countries who experienced high levels of pro-democracy mobilization before the onset of the pandemic were more likely to see restrictions of the freedom of expression relative to countries with no or low levels of mobilization. Additional three brief case studies (Algeria, Bolivia and India) illustrate the process of how pre-pandemic mass protests fostered the im-position of restrictions on the freedom of expression during the pandemic.
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