Cross-national Protest Potential for Labor and Environmental Movements: The Relevance of Opportunity
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abstract
This dissertation considers what factors—individual characteristics and a country's political conditions—predict the protest potential of people within labor and environmental social movements in various countries throughout the world. Protest literature suggests which individuals tend to protest, but does not consider which people within which movements are inclined towards protest, nor does research consider the actual tactic of protest used. Political opportunity theory has suggested that characteristics at the state-level—such as the openness of governmental decision-making, stability of elite alignments, or the level of political repression—can facilitate or constrain the ability of movement actors to achieve their goals, yet the research in this area does not compare protest across movements or countries.
A multi-level modeling approach is used to answer the questions: “who protests?” and “what country-level political characteristics enable such protest?” Individuals who reside in various movements (i.e. labor and environmental) that are surveyed in the most recent wave of the World Values Survey (WVS) are analyzed. This dataset includes nationally-representative data for respondents from 64 countries. Country data is drawn from other sources that measure various political opportunities.
Protest varies depending on which part of the world system movement participants resided in. Certain individual characteristics were consistent predictors of protest, such as education, political ideology, and post-materialist values. Physical integrity rights predicted demonstration attendance in both labor and environmental movements, for those who had and might protest (compared to those who would never). Other political opportunities, such as democracy, regime durability, political rights, and civil liberties, were significant factors in some instances, but not others. This research contributes to the literature on social movements as the first cross-national analysis of how political opportunities operate in different national contexts, for individuals in different movements.
adviser
Rudy Fenwick
commitee members
Jerry Lewis, Karl Kaltenthaler, Brent Teasdale, John Zipp
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