The Austrian Protest Arena in the 21st Century

Political protest has become a typical feature of contemporary democracies. The project aims at analysing the amount and especially the characteristics of political protest in Austria for the period 19982015. Meyer and Tarrows movement society thesis will be used as starting point. This concept emphasises the particular importance of social movements and unconventional forms of political participation. Based on this thesis the project will focus on four aspects of the protest arena, thus on four characteristics of political protest in Austria: the issues expressed, the actors involved, the targets confronted, and the modes of action used. It will be tested whether political protest as postulated by the movement society thesis has indeed become a phenomenon that transcends specific types of issues and actors traditionally associated with this arena, whether the targets of protest increasingly go beyond state authorities (and include, for example, firms or religious organisations), and whether the activists predominantly use moderate, that is first of all legal and non-violent types of action. Austria, which has only rarely been studied in this research tradition, is considered a typical case among Western democracies to test the movement society thesis. The observation period additionally allows for assessing how important changes in the political context, namely in the composition of governments, impact on the protest arena: From 20002007 the populist radical right was part of the federal government. Before and afterwards Austria was governed by grand coalitions, the type of government typically associated with this country. On the regional level, by contrast, the Greens stepwise entered six out of nine Land governments. The amount and characteristics of political protest will be studied by conducting a quantitative content analysis, a protest event analysis. This method uses various types of sources to systematically collect information on protests. In this project two related but nevertheless different types of sources will be used: news reports produced by the APA (Austria Presse Agentur), Austrias national news agency, and press releases (OTS-Meldungen, Original Text Service-Messages) of actors organising protests. While the former is a classic type of source in this research field, the latter has not been used so far. The project thus aims at breaking new ground in three ways: First, by conducting one of the first systematic evaluations of the movement society thesis; second, by assessing the specific impact of radical changes in government composition at two levels of the political system (national and regional levels); and third, by combining a well-established source (news reports) with a new type of source (press releases) in a protest event analysis.

Since the 1970s, there has been an expansion of the concept of political participation. The traditional focus on institutionalized forms of involvement - especially voting - has been replaced by a broader view of various modes of interest articulation. Political protest, defined as the sum of non-institutionalized forms of participation that attempt to influence the actions of political and other actors (e.g., firms), has become an important research topic too. This project examines these modes of participation based on a comprehensive analysis of political protest in Austria from 1998 to 2016. Political protest can be analyzed at the individual level using survey research. The approach taken here, by contrast, is based on an analysis of protest events. For their identification, researchers primarily use mass media as well as government records (police data). The protest event analysis carried out in the project is based on reports by the news agency APA and thus uses a source that is often the basis for articles in newspapers. Using a list of keywords containing various forms of protest (e.g., vigils), 200,000 out of 1.6 million reports were automatically identified. In a second, manual step all reports were checked for their relevance and then analyzed for content. The data obtained in this way allow systematic statements to be made about the Austrian protest arena, including the development of protests over time, their forms, and their topics. The temporal development of the data shows that the protest level reached in 2000 has remained an outlier. Protests against the first ÖVP-FPÖ coalition led to the largest mobilization in the Second Republic. A total of 882 events were recorded that year, with protests against Czech nuclear power plants playing an important role alongside anti-government protests. On average over the years studied, only about half as many protests were identified. The vast majority of protests exhibit moderate forms of action. The forms of protest recorded in detail can be grouped into four categories. Of the 8,771 events recorded, 18 percent were petitions, 66 percent of protests had demonstrative forms (e.g., rallies), and 13 percent were confrontational (e.g., occupations). About 4 percent of the recorded protests were classified as light or serious violence against persons or property. In terms of the topics of the protests, environmental protection was the most important issue even before the climate change protests since 2019: 21 percent of the events were classified as environmental protests. 16 percent include issues that can be classified as "lifestyle." They include protests by the women's and LGBT movements and their opponents, among others. 15 percent of protests addressed economic issues (e.g., wages), and 14 percent welfare issues (e.g., pensions).