Center for the Study of Democracy

The 2008 European recession has been linked to higher political unconventionality across countries in recent studies. Research on the impact of the economic downturn on people’s engagement in protest has focused on data mostly from 2008 to 2012. Recent findings have supported primarily a relative deprivation theory based explanation of why Europeans choose to participate in street marches, suggesting a change has taken place in the way the economy affects political contention. This article assesses the relationship between the economy and protest in 2014, six years after the crisis took place, a long enough period for countries to have improved their economic situation and for people’s interpretations of the economy to be more optimistic. Does the economy still matter to explain protest if it is not as salient any longer? This research employs data for 13 European Union member states from the 2008 and 2014 European Social Survey to test the importance of national level objective economic indicators as well as individual level evaluations of financial wellbeing to study the link between confrontational activism and economic variables. Some of the findings suggest a limited relevance of the economy in the explanation of protest, for objective economic variables, yet a more salient role for personal interpretations of economic wellbeing. Yet, a combination of relative deprivation and resources theories is needed to understand why citizens choose protest in light of the economic situation. The link between the economy and confrontational activism in 2008 and 2014 looks in the end very similar, dismissing any serious long term change in the relationship.