Protesting Culture and Economics in Western Europe: New Cleavages in Left and Right Politics

Description

In this far-reaching work, Swen Hutter demonstrates the usefulness of studying both electoral politics and protest politics to better understand the impacts of globalization. Hutter integrates research on cleavage politics and populist parties in Western Europe with research on social movements. He shows how major new cleavages restructured protest politics over a thirty-year period, from the 1970s through the 1990s. This major study brings back the concept of cleavages to social movement studies and connects the field with contemporary research on populism, electoral behavior, and party politics. Hutter’s work extends the landmark 1995 New Social Movements in Western Europe, the book that spurred the recognition that a broad empirical frame is valuable for understanding powerful social movements. This new book shows that it is also beneficial to include the study of political parties and protest politics. While making extensive use of public opinion, protest event, and election campaigning data, Hutter skillfully employs contemporary data from six West European societies—Austria, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland—to account for responses to protest events and political issues across countries. Protesting Culture and Economics in Western Europe makes productive empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions to the study of social movements and comparative politics. Empirically, it employs a new approach, along with new data, to explain changes in European politics over several decades. Methodologically, it makes rigorous yet creative use of diverse datasets in innovative ways, particularly across national borders. And theoretically, it makes a strong claim for considering the distinctive politics of protest across various issue domains as it investigates the asymmetrical politics of protest from left and right. Cover Contents Introduction: From the Libertarian Left to the Populist Right I. Theoretical Framework and the Context of Protest Politics 1. Globalization and the Integration–Demarcation Cleavage 2. Protest Politics, Electoral Politics, and the Political Process Approach 3. The Context Faced by Challengers: Institutions, Prevailing Strategies, and Cleavages II. Empirical Analyses of Protest Politics 4. A New Protest Wave in the Age of Globalization? 5. Issue Divides in the Protest Arena: The Big Picture 6. Issue Divides in the Protest Arena: The Comparative Picture 7. Different Logics at Work? The Relationship between Protest and Electoral Politics Conclusion: The Dynamics of Cleavage Politics across Political Arenas Appendix A: The Protest Event Data and Selection Bias Tests Appendix B: Issue Categorization Appendix C: Salience of the Specific Issues by Decade and Country Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z