Borrowing insights from the economic voting literature to study protest politics

Social movement studies have neglected the role of objective economic conditions as an explanatory factor for increasing or declining protest levels for several decades. Based on the famous dictum of McCarthy and Zald (Reference McCarthy and Zald1977: 1215) that ‘there is always enough discontent in any society to support the grassroots supply for a movement’, the field rather focused on the role of organisations, the political context and discursive strategies to mobilise discontent in society (Buechler Reference Buechler, Snow, Soule and Kriesi2004). While (relative) economic grievances made their way back into social movement studies in the Great Recession (e.g., Beissinger & Sasse Reference Beissinger, Sasse, Bartels and Bermeo2014; Della Porta Reference Della Porta2015; Grasso & Giugni Reference Grasso and Giugni2016; Quaranta Reference Quaranta2016; Kurer et al. Reference Kurer, Häusermann, Wüest and Enggist2018), the field still tends to lack a set of well‐established arguments and findings on the relation between economic performance and aggregate protest levels. That is why in this article we resort to the economic voting framework.

The raison d'être of the economic voting literature is exactly the search for relations between economic indicators and political behaviour. It assumes instrumentally rational voters, who will reward the incumbents with their vote when the economy is good and punish them when the economy is bad. Much of the literature conceives of economic voting as any change in the support for the chief executive, but some research also focuses on changes in support for the government coalition. According to most studies, it is not the personal financial situation that is decisive for the economic vote but the perception of the national economy (e.g., Duch & Stevenson Reference Duch and Stevenson2008; Lewis‐Beck & Stegmaier Reference Lewis‐Beck, Stegmaier, Dalton and Klingemann2007). The literature thus shows that voting depends on the economic context and that economic voting is pervasive both in ‘normal’ and ‘crisis’ periods. Increasing work also documents how strongly incumbents were punished in the Great Recession and that the punishment varies in line with the predictions of the economic voting literature – that is, according to how hard the economic crisis hit individual countries (e.g., Bartels Reference Bartels, Bartels and Bermeo2014; Hernández & Kriesi Reference Hernández and Kriesi2016; Talving Reference Talving2018).

Furthermore, the literature on economic voting shows that the effects are conditioned by the political context. Three points are particularly important: First, Powell and Whitten's (Reference Powell and Whitten1993) landmark study has documented for the first time that the clarity of political responsibility conditions economic voting: the voters’ assessment of the government's economic performance plays a more decisive role if the national institutional context allows the voters to clearly attribute the responsibility for the economic performance to the government. Duch and Stevenson's (Reference Duch and Stevenson2008) much more detailed results confirm this evidence. Second, recent work also documents important differences depending on the institutionalisation of the party system (e.g., Hernández & Kriesi Reference Hernández and Kriesi2016) – that is, economic voting presupposes a certain degree of structured and long‐term interactions of the parties in a given system. In our sample, this mainly differentiates the party systems in Western and Eastern Europe. Measured against several criteria, the latter are far less institutionalised (Casal Bértoa Reference Casal Bértoa2014), and as Neff Powell and Tucker (Reference Neff Powell and Tucker2013) show, the high level of volatility in these systems since the democratic transition has above all been due to the entry and exit of parties. Finally, research in the economic voting tradition has documented that, in times of increasing globalisation, voters are less likely to punish national governments in bad economic times because they perceive the constraints of national governments’ influence on economic developments (e.g., Hellwig & Samuels Reference Hellwig and Samuels2007; Costa Lobo & Lewis‐Beck Reference Costa Lobo, Lewis‐Beck, Arzheimer, Evans and Lewis‐Beck2017).

As the current economic crisis brought to the fore the strong economic and political interdependencies in Europe, the previous arguments would lead us to expect that the impact of economic conditions on the punishment of incumbents should be weaker – or at least not stronger – in the Great Recession. This is also what some empirical studies show (e.g., Magalhães Reference Magalhães2014; Talving Reference Talving2018). However, other scholars in the economic voting field suggest being cautious here. For example, Costa Lobo and Lewis‐Beck (Reference Costa Lobo, Lewis‐Beck, Arzheimer, Evans and Lewis‐Beck2017: 616ff) emphasise that some of the negative findings might simply be methodological artifacts – that is, studies based on individual‐level cross‐sectional data are not able to grasp the effects of the economic vote because of restricted variance. In a context of a profound economic crisis, a large part of society – regardless of partisan attachments – acknowledges the economic problems.Footnote ²

There is yet another reason for why scholars might have found differing results of the crisis on the economic vote in the Great Recession – namely timing (Hernández & Kriesi Reference Hernández and Kriesi2016). The current economic crisis unfolded in stages: while the initial economic shock affected almost all European countries, the economic prospects of most, but not all, improved fairly quickly thereafter. The voters in the countries where the economy continued to stagnate or even experienced a pronounced double‐dip recession are, therefore, likely to have perceived the incumbents’ failure as particularly serious, not only compared to the pre‐2008 situation but also compared to other countries (on benchmarking, see Kayser & Peress Reference Kayser and Peress2012).

Taking these insights from research on economic voting and benchmarking as our starting point, we test whether the same dynamics are at play when looking at the ups and downs of protests over economic issues. As Piven and Cloward (Reference Piven and Cloward1977: 15) have already noted a long time ago, ‘ordinarily, defiance is first expressed in the voting booth simply because, whether defiant or not, people have been socialized within a political culture that defines voting as the mechanism through which political change can and should properly occur’. Accordingly, the first signs of popular discontent are sharp shifts in voting patterns. However, as highlighted before, the movement literature also emphasises that, in the absence of immediately available options in institutionalised arenas, discontented groups are likely to resort to the protest arena and try to force concessions from political elites by directly appealing to the public. In other words, we expect that protest mobilisation related to economic matters should also be driven by bad economic performance, especially in later stages of the crisis and under ‘favourable’ political conditions, such as clarity of responsibility and high party system institutionalisation (this is our ‘equivalence hypothesis’).

Enriching the economic voting literature: The signalling function of protest politics

In addition to establishing whether the same economic and political factors drive the ups and downs in protest politics as in electoral politics, we shall focus on the questions of whether and how protests might have aggravated electoral losses of incumbents in the Great Recession. More specifically, we emphasise the role of protest as a ‘signalling mechanism’ that attributes blame to decision makers and highlights the political dimension of deteriorating economic conditions (see Lohmann Reference Lohmann1993).

Regarding the dynamics of electoral and protest politics, we build on Schattschneider's (Reference Schattschneider1960) idea of the ‘expansion of conflict’. According to this idea, public protest is designed to unleash a public debate, to draw the attention of the public to the grievances of the actors in question, to create controversy where there was none, and to obtain the support of the public for the actors’ concerns. Put differently, protest fulfils three essential functions that may drive the dynamic relation between protest and electoral politics: they draw attention to the public's grievances and may unleash a controversy (attention function); they attribute political responsibility for (economic) disparities (attribution function); and they can strengthen allies in the political system (spin function) (for a related discussion, see Gillion & Soule Reference Gillion and Soule2018: 2ff)

Such a view of political conflict is most prominent in the agenda‐setting literature, and recent contributions from that tradition emphasise the power of protest to signal discontent and raise the salience of certain issues in more institutionalised arenas (e.g., Vliegenthart et al. Reference Vliegenthart2016). In addition, the pressure from below tends to strengthen the opposition and other allies of the protesting groups in the political system, which may be the main reason why opposition parties support or even create such protest in the first place. The controversial public debates that result from the expansion of conflict by protest mobilisation increase the legitimacy of speakers and allies of movements with journalists and decision makers, who tend to closely follow the public debates (Gamson & Meyer Reference Gamson, Meyer, McAdam, McCarthy and Zald1996: 288). Wolfsfeld's (Reference Wolfsfeld1997: 47) ‘principle of political resonance’ formulates this relationship in a concise way: challengers who succeed in producing events, which resonate with the professional and political culture of important news media, can compete with much more powerful adversaries.

For our argument, it is important that such protest actions may set in motion contentious episodes involving a sequence of interactions between the government and its challengers (see Kriesi et al. Reference Kriesi, Hutter and Bojar2019; McAdam et al. Reference McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly2001). In this sequence, the challengers’ protest attributes responsibility for the problem at stake to the incumbents – that is, it serves as a signal for the political dimension of the problem. This was also the case for the social movements and protest campaigns that emerged in the context of the Great Recession: they had a clear message, opposing austerity and calling for democratic renewal, which emphasised the responsibility of both national and European elites for mismanaging the economic crisis and for exacerbating problems of democratic representation (e.g., Altiparmakis & Lorenzini Reference Altiparmakis and Lorenzini2018; Della Porta Reference Della Porta2015). Given their structural constraints, incumbent parties have above all resorted to procedural concessions to accommodate the pressure from the streets: changes in leadership, reshuffles of the cabinet composition, calls for early elections or ceding responsibility to a caretaker government composed of technocrats. The situation of governments in the countries that were hardest hit by the crisis proved to be particularly uncomfortable in this respect. Not only were they exposed to domestic pressure in the streets, but they also faced pressure from international stakeholders who expected them to act responsibly and execute the measures deemed necessary by the ‘markets’.

Consequently, the interaction dynamics between protest and electoral politics seem particularly closely coupled in a crisis context. A typical scenario for the interaction between protest and electoral politics in the countries most severely hit by the crisis may look like this: The discontented groups mobilise against austerity measures even before the next elections, and in response to the protests, the incumbents make some procedural concessions. Yet, the incumbents fail in satisfying the voters, who severely punish them in the first national elections after the crisis. In these elections, the established opposition parties win office. Once in charge, however, the new government is hardly able to adopt any other policy than the previous government, given the economic constraints imposed on them. Such a situation is likely to further boost protest in the streets, which emphasises the responsibility of the government for the economic situation and increases electoral punishment in later crisis elections. Partly because of the protests, the voters are bound to notice that the new government is forced to take the same measures as its predecessors, whom they had voted out of office, and they may resort to punishing the mainstream parties as a whole in the following elections – by turning to new challengers or by exiting from the established electoral channel altogether. The eventual result may be a profound destabilisation of the national party system (Roberts Reference Roberts2017).

While case studies of countries in Southern Europe support this scenario (on Spain, see, e.g., Vidal Reference Vidal2018), we aim for an aggregate analysis and formulate two important expectations about the impact of protest mobilisation on electoral punishment in the Great Recession. First, while we do not expect a direct effect of protest on electoral punishment, we do expect that protests play an important role in attributing responsibility for the economic decline and the growing cross‐national disparities to the national and European elites. Massive protests should thus amplify the connections between economic misery and the losses of governments in national elections. We suggest calling this the ‘signalling mechanism’ of protest and, empirically, we expect to find that economic voting is stronger in contexts of high protest mobilisation (‘signalling hypothesis’).

Second, protest mobilisation is expected to intensify the feeling among voters that there is a more fundamental ‘crisis of representation’ as a change in government may not result in a change of policy. Therefore, we expect that protest mobilisation may act as an important trigger of the further destabilisation of European party systems by highlighting that mainstream parties (both in opposition and in government) no longer fulfil their representative functions and are, therefore, punished in national elections regardless of whether they are in government or not (‘destabilisation hypothesis’). Note that both expectations depend on the power of the economic vote in the first place – that is, if electoral punishment is hardly related to economic developments, such as in less institutionalised and highly volatile party systems, it is unlikely that protests may serve the signalling function envisioned in our ideal‐typical scenario.

The drivers of electoral and protest politics in the Great Recession

Following the literature on economic voting, we start our analysis by assessing the importance of the economic context on electoral losses and protest levels. We compare the factors that drive economic voting and economic protest mobilisation during the 118 legislative periods included in our dataset. A descriptive analysis reveals that both electoral losses and protests are positively correlated with economic misery. Consequently, we also find that both the average electoral loss and average protests sharply increased in post‐crisis Europe. As Table 1 shows, the average electoral loss of the incumbent increased from 3.60 percentage points in the pre‐crisis period to 8.41 and 7.75 percentage points in first‐crisis and later‐crisis elections, respectively. At the same time, the average number of protest events increased from around 83 in the pre‐crisis period to around 147 in the first‐crisis period, while the average number of protesters increased from 733,742 in the pre‐crisis period to 1,054,611 in the first‐crisis period. A further look at the data with bivariate correlations and scatter plots reveals that economic misery is correlated with both electoral volatility and protests, but it already suggests that the electoral arena follows more closely the ups and downs of the economic cycle (see Online Appendix A‐4). Moreover, the relationship between the economy and electoral and protest politics turns out to be significantly weaker in the less institutionalised party systems in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe.

These patterns are confirmed by the regression analysis presented in Table 2. We use simple ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions with the electoral loss of the prime minister's party and the number of protest events in a given legislative period as dependent variables in separate analyses.Footnote ⁶ As expected, a larger change in economic misery is related to larger electoral losses. According to model 1, a one standard deviation increase in misery is associated with a 0.34 standard deviation increase in electoral loss of the incumbent, which is equivalent to 3.14 percentage points.Footnote ⁷ Turning to protest, we find a similar pattern: a larger change in economic misery is related to a higher level of economic protests (model 2). This effect is a little smaller, but also significant: a one standard deviation increase in misery is associated with a 0.32 standard deviation increase in the number of protests. This is equivalent to an increase in protests by around 18.7 events per year or 27,000 people per 1 million inhabitants per year (see Online Appendix B‐1).Footnote ⁸

Table 2 The impact of economic misery on electoral loss and protest

Notes: t statistics in parentheses. ⁺p < 0.1; *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001.

As expected, this relationship between misery and electoral loss and protest, respectively, becomes even stronger when we focus on Western Europe exclusively. As models 5 and 6 in Table 2 show, both the regression coefficient and the R² increase significantly compared to models 1 and 2, respectively. This confirms that the electoral and protest arena are more closely associated with the ups and downs of the economy in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe.

The results presented in Table 2 also suggest that timing matters for both electoral and protest dynamics. To test this, we considered an interaction effect of economic misery and the timing variable (models 3 and 4 for all countries; models 7 and 8 for Western Europe only). The results are best interpreted with the help of Figure 1, which plots the marginal effect of misery by election type. Figures 1a and 1b suggest that economic misery and electoral loss became more closely correlated over time: a change in the prevailing economic conditions was not associated with electoral losses in the pre‐crisis period, but it had a positive marginal effect during the crisis. In later‐crisis elections especially, citizens perceived the worsening economic conditions as a failure of the incumbent parties and punished them at the voting booth. In other words, as the crisis progressed, the fate of governments tended to be increasingly tied to the economic performance of their country. Figures 1c and 1d show the same relationship for protest. They indicate that a change in economic misery neither predicted whether citizens took to the streets before the crisis nor whether they did so in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. However, we find a strong positive effect of economic misery on the level of economic protest during later stages of the economic crisis. This is well exemplified by the massive protests and electoral turmoil in countries like Greece or Portugal, which only erupted after the first ‘crisis’ elections in 2009.

Figure 1. Average marginal effect of a change in misery on electoral loss and protest by election type [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

Note: The average marginal effects are calculated based on models 3, 4, 7 and 8 in Table 2, respectively. For each period, they are obtained by calculating the marginal effect of misery for each observation and then taking the average across all observations for a given period.

To test the robustness of these results, which suggest that the Great Recession affected the electoral and the protest arena in a relatively similar way, we conducted several additional analyses. First, we re‐estimated the regressions with country‐clustered standard errors to account for a possible correlation of errors from the same country (Online Appendix B‐3). The results are very similar to the ones shown above, indicating that our results are robust to possible country‐level clusters. Second, given the relatively small number of cases, we tested whether our results are driven by outliers in two different ways (Online Appendix B‐3): we estimated quantile (median) regression and robust regressions to reduce the importance of outliers.Footnote ⁹ Using these techniques, the coefficients for protest become smaller, but they are still significant and generally support the patterns that we found above. Finally, in the spirit of a ‘placebo’ test, we used the number of cultural and political protests as the dependent variable (Online Appendix C‐1). For these non‐economic protests, economic misery and the crisis did not systematically affect the number of events. In other words, only economic protests are positively associated with misery, increasing our confidence that the uncovered relationship between misery and economic protests is, indeed, meaningful.

Protest and the economic vote

As suggested above, both arenas are interwoven with national and international political dynamics and there is reason to believe that protest politics and electoral politics are closely related. Consequently, we try to move beyond the search for equivalent relations and test the importance of protest mobilisation as a signalling mechanism that may reinforce electoral punishment. Again using OLS regression, we repeat the analysis from the first step with electoral losses as the dependent variable, but we now include our measure of protests as an independent variable. To test whether there is a signalling mechanism, we include an interaction between protests and our economic misery indicator. Otherwise this analysis mirrors the analysis from the first step.

Table 3 shows the results of this exercise. The analysis confirms that a change in misery has a strong effect on the electoral performance of incumbents (see model 1). Looking at results from all 30 European countries, however, the interaction effect of protest and misery is only statistically significant at the 10 percent significance level (see model 3). When we repeat the analysis for Western Europe only (see models 4–6), the results become stronger: there is now a positive and clearly statistically significant interaction effect of protest and economic misery. Following the recommendation of Brambor et al. (Reference Brambor, Clark and Golder2006), we plot the average marginal effect in Figure 2 to illustrate this interaction. The plot shows how the average marginal effect of economic misery on the electoral loss of the incumbent changes across the observed range of protest. It demonstrates that this effect varies over the range of protest, but the interaction effect is only significant when we focus on Western Europe (Figure 2b). In this region, a change in misery has only a small effect on electoral punishment when protests are low, but as protests increase, the average marginal effect of misery also increases. Protests thus seem to amplify the impact of an increase in economic misery on the electoral performance of incumbents, supporting our expectations about the signalling effect of protest in Western Europe.Footnote ¹⁰ As theorised above, opposing austerity and linking that opposition to a fundamental critique of representative democracy – ‘real democracy now’ as the battle cry of the Indignados went – was key for the most recent wave of protest in Southern Europe. For Eastern Europe, where party systems are less institutionalised, Hernández and Kriesi (Reference Hernández and Kriesi2016) already showed that voters are less likely to punish governments for worsening economic conditions than in Western Europe. Hence, and as outlined above, it is not surprising that we do not find a strong signalling effect of protest on electoral punishment in Eastern Europe, either.Footnote ¹¹

Table 3 The impact of economic misery and protest on electoral loss

Notes: t statistics in parentheses. ⁺p < 0.1; *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001.

Figure 2. Average marginal effect of a change in misery on electoral loss across the range protest

Note: The average marginal effects are calculated based on models 3 and 6 in Table 3, respectively.

Additional analyses shown in the Online Appendix suggest that this signalling effect of protest is robust. When we use the number of protest participants instead of the number of events to measure protest levels (Online Appendix B‐1), the signalling effect is marginally smaller but remains statistically significant. Quantile median and robust regression models show that our results are again robust to potential outliers (Online Appendix B‐3). Moreover, there is no signalling effect for protests that address non‐economic issues as shown in Online Appendix C‐1. We again treat this as a ‘placebo’ test, which indicates that it is not any kind of protest that has an impact on economic voting. Only economic protests act as a signal for economic discontent and attribute blame for misery to the government. This is also supported by an analysis, in which we tested whether higher economic voting is associated with higher economic protests afterwards (Online Appendix C‐2). Generally, we find that the punishment of incumbents tends to dampen economic protests in the legislative period after a given election. Although we expect that the effect of elections on protest might be different in the short term (given that citizens sometimes express their dissatisfaction with the electoral contest by protesting), we treat this as evidence indicating that economic protests trigger the punishment of incumbents and not vice versa.

Protest and the decline of mainstream parties

These results give us reason to believe that the economic crisis and the resulting mobilisation in the streets have had deeper consequences for political competition in Europe than the short‐term punishment of incumbents. Therefore, in the final step of our analysis, we turn to a more careful analysis of whether the crisis has also accelerated the decline of mainstream parties and how this decline is related to political contestation in the protest arena. To this end, we move to the party level and analyse the electoral losses of all parties (and not exclusively incumbents) – that is, we calculate the level of electoral loss for each individual party as the change in its vote share between a given election at time t and t‐1. Given our results so far, we restrict our analysis to Western Europe only and study electoral results from 77 elections in 20 Western countries from 2000 to 2015.

In order to analyse the impact of protest on the dynamics of party competition we classify the parties in two ways. First, we code parties as mainstream versus non‐mainstream parties according to their party family, as indicated by the Chapel Hill Expert Survey: parties from the conservative, Christian democratic, social democratic and liberal party families are classified as mainstream, whereas parties from all other party families are classified as non‐mainstream. Second, we classify parties according to their left‐right ideology: parties that are social democratic, green or far left are classified as left parties, whereas all other parties are classified as non‐left parties.Footnote ¹²

The summary statistics for each party family are shown in Table 4. On average, mainstream parties lose 0.75 percentage points in an election during our period of study, but there are important differences across time. In the pre‐crisis period, mainstream and non‐mainstream parties, on average, hardly experienced electoral gains or losses. Yet, this changed during the crisis: in the 20 first‐crisis elections in Western Europe, mainstream parties on average lost 1.73 percentage points, while they lost 1.25 percentage points in later‐crisis elections. At the same time, non‐mainstream parties benefited from the crisis: on average, they increased their vote share by 1.83 percentage points in first‐crisis elections and by 0.87 percentage points in later‐crisis elections. The average vote share of left‐wing parties remained relatively stable across our period of study, but it changed from one period to the other: the left gained votes in pre‐ and first‐crisis elections, but lost votes in later‐crisis elections.

Table 4 Electoral losses by party type in Western Europe

Note: The data shows the electoral loss of different types of parties – that is, the difference in the vote share of parties between elections at times t and t+1. Positive values indicate a loss in vote share; negative values indicate a gain.

To assess the gains and losses of the different types of parties more systematically, we again resort to OLS regressions, but we now use the electoral losses of individual parties as our dependent variable. We use the same independent variables as in the previous steps of our analysis, but following the literature on economic voting, we also include two dummy variables that capture whether a party was in government, and whether the prime minister was from that particular party during a given legislative period. In the baseline model we then include a dummy variable for mainstream parties and test the differential effect of a change in economic misery and protests on mainstream versus non‐mainstream parties by including an interaction effect with this dummy variable. Similarly, we repeat the analysis and examine the differential effect of economic misery and protest punishment for left‐ and right‐wing parties in separate models.

The results of these analyses are shown in Table 5. Model 1 confirms our earlier finding that governing parties are punished more consistently at polls than other parties, but in general, there is no negative effect for mainstream parties. These parties are not losing consistently during our period of study, shedding some doubt on the general thesis of the long‐term decline of mainstream parties. Yet, the results suggest that the electoral fortunes of mainstream parties are related to the level of protest in a given legislative period. The interaction effect between mainstream parties and protests is positive and statistically significant, indicating that the electoral punishment of mainstream parties increases as protests become larger. To interpret this interaction effect, it is useful to plot the marginal effect of protest by party type (Figure 3). The results indicate that the marginal effect of protest for non‐mainstream parties is negative, while the effect is positive for mainstream parties. Put differently, protests increase the electoral losses of mainstream parties, while non‐mainstream parties fare better in elections after such protests. As we expected, this results in the fragmentation of the party system and highlights the need to integrate the study of protest into analyses of party competition.

Table 5 The effect of misery and protest on the electoral loss of different parties in Western Europe

Notes: t statistics in parentheses. ⁺p < 0.1; *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001.

Figure 3. Average marginal effect of protest on electoral loss of mainstream vs. non‐ [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

mainstream parties

Note: The average marginal effects are calculated based on model 1 in Table 5.

Model 2 in Table 5 goes one step further and investigates whether the signalling effect of protest also holds at the level of individual parties, thereby contributing to the restructuring of the party system in Western Europe. It includes a three‐way interaction between party type, protest and economic misery to test whether the impact of a change in economic misery on the electoral support for mainstream parties is amplified by protest. To interpret the results, we again visualise the interaction effect by showing the average marginal effect of a change in misery on the electoral losses of different party types over the observed range of protest (Figure 4). When the level of protest is low, misery has no significant effect on the economic performance of different types of parties. Yet, as the level of protest increases, the average marginal effect of misery becomes positive for mainstream parties but negative for non‐mainstream parties. This suggests that the relationship between the prevailing economic conditions and the punishment of mainstream parties is not direct. Instead, citizens are more likely to defect from mainstream parties when there is a relatively large amount of economic protest, which, as we posit, politicises the fact that the economy is doing poorly.

Figure 4. Average marginal effect of misery on electoral loss of mainstream vs. non‐ mainstream parties across the range of protest [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

Note: The average marginal effects are calculated based on model 2 in Table 5.

Models 3 and 4 of Table 5 repeat this analysis, but we now distinguish between left‐wing parties and all other parties. The results indicate that there is only a weak interaction between protest politics and the fortunes of left‐wing parties. The latter do not generally benefit from protests – something that is also illustrated by the descriptive results shown in Table 4 and the marginal effects plot (included in Appendix C‐4). This questions the general idea of a close alliance between social movements and parties from the left in Europe.Footnote ¹³ Yet, when we include a three‐way interaction between left‐wing parties, misery and protests, an interesting pattern emerges: generally left‐wing parties somewhat gain during economic downturns, but this effect ceases to exist as protest increases. In fact, the results in Online Appendix C‐4 show that left‐wing parties only benefit from a worsening of economic misery when there is little economic protest. Taken together, models 3 and 4 indicate that the effect of protest did not systematically move Western European party systems in one direction or the other in terms of the traditional left‐right spectrum during the Great Recession. This supports earlier findings by Bartels (Reference Bartels, Bartels and Bermeo2014), who could not find clear‐cut ideological shifts to the left or right in the electoral arena during the Great Recession.

Finally, these results are also supported by our robustness tests. First, when we consider the number of participants instead of events, we also find that mainstream parties lose more in elections that follow a high level of protest in a given legislative period (Online Appendix B‐1). Second, the analysis is also robust to outliers, as indicated by the results from quantile median and robust regressions models (Online Appendix B‐3). Third, the results are very similar if we study relative losses, taking into account the differing vote shares of the parties (Online Appendix B‐4). Finally, the ‘placebo test’ in Online Appendix C‐1 shows that mainstream parties are not punished following non‐economic protest. Overall, these results suggest that economic protests tend to be an important factor that has driven the destabilisation of Western European party systems during the Great Recession.