Does an Empty Wallet Drive You to the Streets? The Impact of Economic Factors on Protests - Lennard Plotnicki

Photo by Damon Zaidmus on Unsplash

Lennard Plotnicki

Edited by Alice Palmer & Iman Shaikh
Supervised by Jaspen Döninghaus
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Participating in protests is an important aspect of the political process that allows citizens to voice their opinions: both of support and dissatisfaction. It also enables the public  to effectively engage in democracy by making themselves heard if they are otherwise underrepresented, kicking off debates, and setting the agenda. A manifold of factors can determine why certain individuals are likely to engage in protest, how protest movements form, and how they can be successful. 

In our chapter’s upcoming submission for the Review of European & Transatlantic Affairs, also focussed on protests, we discuss in detail a broad range of other factors that affect protests, such as social media and overall media coverage. However, in this paper, I will focus on specifically the economic domain and how it broadly impacts protest movements. The economic domain is expansive: on the one hand, it  applies to the individual level through  certain socioeconomic traits, such as unemployment, which may impact one’s likelihood of engaging in protest.  It also applies on  the macro level (i.e. the economic situation of a country at large), and in more structural ways — such as resource allocation or government spending.

​Read the full article here.