When grievances produced by the economic shock lead to protest and when they restrain individuals from expressing their indignation? In the aftermath of the Great Recession, with the abrupt end of the period of economic growth, and the rise of share of protests that have been addressing socio-economic inequality, material security, redistribution, or economic issues in general, the growing body of literature has reintroduced grievances as a theoretically and empirically important concept. Notwithstanding, these studies are reporting inconclusive findings about the effect that grievances produced by the economic shock have on protest participation, and, until recently, have been failing to recognise that grievances can be multidimensional and possibly mediated by available resources and opportunities. To address this gap, this paper explores the propensity of citizens to participate in the protests from the perspective of experienced objective, subjective and political grievances by using panel data. A longitudinal perspective enables, on the one hand, exploration of the effect that different grievances’ dimensiones might have on protest participation during the anti-austerity cycle of contention in Spain, and on the another, assessment whether this effect is short-termed, or it endures and matures over the time.
Recent events in multiple advanced democracies have led to a renewed interest about one of the classic political cleavages: the rural-urban divide. The acceleration of the processes linked to globalization has accentuated a gap between the countryside and the city that has spread beyond demographic and economic aspects. The relevant question is whether this contrast tallies with a division in the political attitudes of their respective dwellers. The attention devoted to this topic is still scarce and the first studies have focused on examining differences in satisfaction with democracy between urban and rural habitats. Rural areas have often been labelled by the literature as “left-behind” zones or “places that don’t matter”; probably this could explain the prominent anti-establishment reactions that have emerged from the rural world and their lower levels of satisfaction with democracy. In this paper we ask whether these processes can be related to differences in external political efficacy between rural and urban dwellers. Using data from rounds 8-9 of the European Social Survey we examine whether residents in rural areas feel less politically efficacious. Moreover, we assess whether the external political efficacy gap between urban and rural areas is smaller in those countries with higher levels of electoral malapportionment that leads to an overrepresentation of rural areas in national parliaments.
High ideological proximity between parties and voters improves democratic representation as voters remain close to the party system. Research to date has focused on explaining voter-party congruence as a consequence of political developments and electoral results. Only a few scholars examined the overall effect of voter-party congruence on voting behaviour at the party system level. This article examines the impact of incongruence at the party-system level on electoral behaviour. By creating a new dataset with data from 258 national elections from countries across Europe, we examined whether ideological incongruence impacts participation in elections or induces a shift towards anti-political-establishment parties. The central hypothesis is that high overall distance between the parties and their voters leads to growing detachment from the party system and hence abstention from elections or voting for parties that criticise the traditional parties that form the core of the party system. The results are mixed as the hypothesis is not confirmed in all states of the sample. In some parts of Europe, it is observed that high levels of ideological incongruence are associated with high abstention rates.
This paper analyzes the influence of abstract review mechanism on the legislative process through an empirical analysis of parties’ behavior from the moment a bill is introduced until there is a potential court ruling. The goal is to study to what extent abstract review contributes to parliament’s consensus building or on the contrary if parties uses it as an electoral weapon. Theoretical models have described a potential “auto-limitation” behavior in parties induced by court aversion attitudes -scholars suppose high costs from vetoing a law- that could favor inter- party agreements. Yet, there are no systematic empirical analyses on this question due to data limitations. Based in web scrapping, text parsing and text-reuse methods we build different datasets, which allow us to monitor every party’s decision regarding each bill along the legislative process -including the potential court revision-. In addition to data on the characteristics of individual judges, the court plenary composition and cases of abstract review the paper considers data on bill’s proposals and the amendatory process –number and type of amendments, and whether they are incorporated into final legislation- to measure the parties’ movements through its policy positions. As exploratory variables, we take into consideration the court ideological composition, internal dynamics and working procedures, as well as contextual factors, such as the politicization of issue and the government and parliamentary geometry. This research based on the Spanish case is especially relevant to explore empirically the potential influence of the court in parliamentary politics, public policies, and legislative analyses and to study the compromises that parties strategically make and their motivation.
Albert Falcó
Toni Rodón
Enrique Hernández
Macarena Ares
Andreu Paneque
Luis Miguel Remiro
Daniel Balinhas
Marta Vallvé