ABSTRACT
Large numbers of studies have drawn attention to rising levels of political protest, whether understood as the spread of ‘demonstration democracy’ (Etzioni 1971), the growth of the ‘protest society’ (Pross 1992), an expression of ‘global civic society’ (Kaldor 2000) or, more popularly in contemporary newspaper headlines, as the emergence of the so-called ‘Genoa generation’. This phenomenon raises important questions about the causes and consequences of these developments, and in particular about who demonstrates, the focus of this chapter. Understanding this issue highlights familiar methodological challenges regarding the extent to which ad hoc and irregular protest activities can be measured through traditional survey techniques or event (content) analysis (Rucht, Koopmans, and Neidhardt 1999). In a bid to examine these developments, the first section summarizes alternative theories commonly used in the literature to explain and interpret demonstration activism, contrasting disaffection, resource-based, and contextual accounts. Today, are most demonstrators disaffected radicals? Are they conventional participants using protest simply as another option or strategic resource, just like any other such as election campaigns or community organizing? Or do demonstrations provide a meeting place that can bring together both radicals and moderates, depending on the particular contextual issue, political actors, and cultural frame? In the second section we describe the sources of evidence used to evaluate these interpretations. The study draws on three main sources of survey evidence. (i) We compare the 1973-1976 baseline Political Action study with successive waves of the World Values Survey 1981-2001 to establish cross-national trends in the extent of protest activity. (ii) The chapter then focuses on Belgium, chosen as a postindustrial society exemplifying the rise of protest politics, where we analyse the 1999 Flanders-Belgium general election study to provide a representative cross-section of the electorate. Lastly (iii) we use a unique series of surveys of protesters who took part in seven different demonstrations in Belgium. The third section examines the evolution of the relevant trends since the mid-1970s, revealing the substantial rise in protest activism in many countries, while the fourth analyses who
demonstrates in Belgium by comparing the social background and attitudinal characteristics of party members, civic joiners, and demonstrators. The fifth section offers a similar analysis of participants in different types of demonstration in Belgium. The conclusion summarizes the major findings and considers their implications for our understanding of the rise of demonstration activism and the challenges this poses to contemporary representative democracy.
