ABSTRACT
The qualitative analysis of the motives formulated by May Day demonstrators for their participation shows that participants indeed employ a broad range of motive vocabularies. In particular, tradition is a motive type that has been unexplored in the protest mobilization literature. This chapter presents a novel way of classifying motives articulated by protest participants. The descriptive quantitative analysis showed that May Day events are far from tired, routinized ritualistic acts. The analysis focuses on a selection of May Day demonstrations from the protest survey dataset constructed by the research programme Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation. In the present analysis, conviction types of motives relate to the latter mode of logic, whereas the expression of personal positions is regarded as taking a stand or protest government/politics In the 2011 May Day demonstration in Geneva less than two months after the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan a common motive was to protest against the local nuclear power plants.
