Wikiversity:Fellow-Programm Freies Wissen/Einreichungen/Political Protest and Generational Change in New Democracies

Political Protest and Generational Change in New Democracies Abstract of the Research Project The normalization of protest in Western societies has been a major development in the field of political participation over the last decades. This process is characterized, first, by a general increase in the propensity of citizens to take part in extra-electoral political actions, and, second, by the diffusion of these activities to virtually all segments of the population (Barnes and Kaase, 1979; Dalton, 2008; Kaase, 2007; Meyer and Tarrow, 1998; Norris, 2002; Quaranta, 2016; Rucht, 2007; Van Aelst and Walgrave, 2001). While this evolution was at times perceived as a threat to democracy, it has now become accepted that extra-electoral participation complements, rather than substitutes, conventional participation (Barber, 1984; Kaase, 2007). What remains unclear, however, is whether the normalization of protest is a unique feature of Western societies or a more generalized phenomenon, applicable to new democracies as well (see Dalton et al., 2010; Roller and Weßels, 1996; Welzel and Deutsch, 2012). Among the few longitudinal studies available on repertoires of contention in new democracies, some actually suggest that these countries are experiencing a decline in protest participation (Inglehart and Catterberg, 2002). Some authors attribute this trend to disappointment with the new regime; others to a legacy of autocracy (Bernhagen and Marsh, 2007; Hooghe and Quintelier, 2014). The later suggest that repression of autonomous pluralism under dictatorship undermined the emergence of social movements after the transition (Bernhard and Karakoç, 2007; Howard, 2003). Using a broader set of evidence, this research project examines if third wave democracies went through a process of protest normalization or, conversely, if they faced a persistent ‘protest deficit.’ The analysis relies on repeated surveys from the World Values Survey, the European Values Study, and the European Social Survey (WVS, 2014; EVS, 2012; ESS, 2015). It covers 62 democracies, including several new democracies from the European periphery, some of them for more than 30 years. Multilevel models are performed with separate estimations of within- and between-country effects. Results indicate that the use of protest is spreading over time in most democratic states, yet the pace of diffusion increases further as democracies get older. This pattern suggests a form of generational replacement in protest participation. Furthermore, citizens that were individually exposed to high levels of repression during their formative years participate systematically less in protest activities. These results highlight the mutually reinforcing relationship between democratic consolidation and peaceful public contestation while also noting the lasting impact of repression on citizens’ political behavior. Implementation of Open Science Principles Open Access My thesis will be structured around four independent, yet complementary papers. I would like to submit the papers to open access journals or, at least, obtain open access licenses once the papers have been accepted. More and more open access journals are appearing in political science. Open Data My work is mostly based on open data from large multinational survey projects. The empirical contribution of my research consists in harmonizing multiple surveys and merging them with political and socioeconomic indicators at the country-level. I am particularly interested in the effect of democratic quality and longevity on the normalization of protest in different countries. If I succeed in publishing parts of my work, I would like to make the data harmonization procedure available by uploading R scripts or Stata do-files on a public repository like GitHub. I will make sure to complement my papers with clear codebooks, extended methodological appendices, and, if I have the resources, online visualization tools. Open Reproducible Research If my research is published, I would also like to make all my statistical analyses entirely reproducible by uploading replication sets, based on R scripts or Stata do-files, on a public repository. In these replication sets, I would like to include detailed readme files explaining the analysis step by step. I am also particularly excited by recent developments in reproducible research and literate programming such as R Markdown techniques (Gentleman and Temple Lang, 2007; Peng, 2011; Xie, 2015). Diffusion of Open Science Ideas Together with a team of PhD students and postdoctoral researchers from Humboldt-Universität and the WZB, I have been organizing for two years the Berlin Summer School in Social Sciences. This event brings together about 60 doctoral students from all over the world. During two weeks, we discuss basic issues related to research design and methodology in the social sciences. We invite more than twenty international and berlin-based lecturers to guide our discussions. If selected for a fellowship, I would like to prepare a workshop on open science for the summer school. In doing so, I would like to address the concerns of young scholars working both quantitatively and qualitatively. I am interested in covering issues such as research integrity, data fishing, and p-value hacking. I could also organize a similar workshop for PhD students at the Social science institute at Humboldt-Universität. References Barber, B. R. (1984). Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Barnes, S. H. and M. Kaase (Eds.) (1979). Political Action: Mass Participation in Five Western Democracies. Beverly Hills: Sage. Bernhagen, P. and M. Marsh (2007). Voting and Protesting: Explaining Citizen Participation in Old and New European Democracies. Democratization 14(1), 44–72. Bernhard, M. and E. Karakoç (2007, July). Civil Society and the Legacies of Dictatorship. World Politics 59(4), 539–567. Dalton, R., A. van Sickle, and S. Weldon (2010, January). The Individual–Institutional Nexus of Protest Behaviour. British Journal of Political Science 40(1), 51–73. Dalton, R. J. (2008, March). Citizenship Norms and the Expansion of Political Participation. Political Studies 56(1), 76–98. ESS (2015). European Social Survey, Rounds 1-7 Data (2002-2014). Bergen: European Social Survey Data Archive, Norwegian Social Science Data Services for ESS ERIC. EVS (2012). European Values Study 1990, 1999, and 2008. Cologne: GESIS Data Archive. Gentleman, R. and D. Temple Lang (2007, March). Statistical Analyses and Reproducible Research. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 16(1), 1–23. Hooghe, M. and E. Quintelier (2014, March). Political participation in European countries: The effect of authoritarian rule, corruption, lack of good governance and economic downturn. Comparative European Politics 12(2), 209–232. Howard, M. M. (2003). The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inglehart, R. and G. Catterberg (2002, October). Trends in Political Action: The Developmental Trend and the Post-Honeymoon Decline. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 43(3-5), 300–316. Kaase, M. (2007). Perspectives on Political Participation. In R. J. Dalton and H.-D. Klingemann (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior, pp. 783–796. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meyer, D. S. and S. Tarrow (Eds.) (1998). The Social Movement Society: Contentious Politics for a New Century. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Norris, P. (2002). Democratic Phoenix: Reinventing Political Activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peng, R. D. (2011, December). Reproducible Research in Computational Science. Science 334(6060), 1226–1227. Quaranta, M. (2016). Towards a Western European "Social Movement Society"? An Assessment: 1981-2009. PArtecipazione e COnfflitto 9(1), 234–258. Datenmanagementplan Siehe /Datenmanagementplan Abschlussbericht Siehe /Abschlussbericht Autor/in Name: Philippe Joly Institution: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Kontakt: jolyphil@hu-berlin.de