Why Men Rebel was first published in 1970 on the heels of a decade of political violence and protest not only in remote corners of Africa and Southeast Asia, but also at home in the United States. Forty years later, the world is riveted on uprisings in the Middle East, and the United States has been overtaken by a focus on international terrorism and a fascination with citizen movements at home and abroad. Do the arguments of 1970 apply today? Why Men Rebel lends new insight into contemporary challenges of transnational recruitment and organization, multimedia mobilization, and terrorism.

Why Men Rebel

Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age

Injury to Insult: Unemployment, Class and Political Response

The new politics of the welfare state

(1989). The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America. Journal of Economic Issues: Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 1236-1239.

The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America

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.

/pdf/economic-grievances-and-political-protest-oajl5id8qi.pdf

Economic grievances and political protest

Recent literature shows that radical right parties (RRPs) present moderate or blurry economic stances. However, this paper argues that this blurriness is restricted to only one of the two main conf...

Radical right parties and their welfare state stances - not so blurry after all?

Class and social policy in the knowledge economy

This chapter contains a study of diffusion among political protests in Europe. We start from a theoretical perspective that assumes protests as inherently interdependent across countries. Hence, we link geographical proximity to the likelihood of protests and we apply a spatial panel data analysis to study this link at the European, regional and cross-border level as well as for different time periods and forms of protests. The results show that spin-off movements across the continent learn from or emulate initiator movements in many instances, but that this diffusion is largely confined to the cross-border level. As a consequence, we did not find sustained protest waves that capture the majority of European countries at once. Similarly, cross-border diffusion is also only relevant for some regions and during some time periods but not universally. It seems that the grievances and opportunity structures in different European countries are varying too much in order to support widespread and long-ranging waves of protest.

Diffusion of protest

How do economic grievances affect citizens’ inclination to protest? In light of rising inequality and widespread economic hardship during the Great Recession, this question is crucial for political science: if adverse economic conditions depress citizens’ engagement, 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. We argue that this is due to two distinct shortcomings, which we effectively address by combining the strengths of political economy and social movement theories. Based on ESS and EUSILC data from 2006 until 2012, as well as newly collected data on political protest in 28 European countries, we first show that a novel, more finegrained conceptualization of economic grievances considerably improves our understanding of their direct impact on protest behavior. While structural economic disadvantage (i.e. the level of grievances) unambiguously de-mobilizes 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, we show that the level of political mobilization substantially moderates this direct link between individual hardship and political activity. In a strongly mobilized 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 organized and visible political action is a decisive signal for citizens that conditions the micro-level link between economic grievances and protest, then democracy itself i.e. organized collective action can help sustain political equality and prevent the vicious circle of democratic erosion.

/pdf/economic-grievances-and-political-protest-economic-1xhpz5xrjd.pdf

Matthias Enggist

Papers

Economic grievances and political protest

Radical right parties and their welfare state stances - not so blurry after all?

Class and social policy in the knowledge economy

Diffusion of protest

Economic grievances and political protest: ECONOMIC GRIEVANCES AND POLITICAL PROTEST