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Project

Provocative Protest. How protest sparks debate and expands the scope of conflict (PROVOKE).

Is protest effective? Extant work suggests that enlarging the so-called 'scope of conflict'—activating other actors—is key for protest to have political impact. Remarkably, little to no work to date has thoroughly theorized nor analysed how protest manages to affect the scope of conflict. PROVOKE breaks new ground by tackling this crucial mediating mechanism of protest power up front. It asks: To what extent, when, and how does protest succeed in expanding the scope of conflict? And, what are the mechanisms driving scope expansion? We approach the puzzle from two levels. A macro-perspective maps and analyzes reactions to protest in mass and social media. We do so by means of a content analysis covering a large number of Belgian protest events across a multitude of issues over an extensive period of time (2000-2020). A micro-perspective, next, leverages interviews and experiments with politicians, stakeholders and journalists to understand the individual-level mechanisms that drive scope expansion. The goals of the project are threefold: (1) to develop an original theory on protest and scope expansion, integrating literature from political science, sociology and communication; (2) to conceptualize and map, for the first time, the scope of conflict surrounding protest events; and (3) to assess which factors—from protest and media features, over traits of political actors, to the contagious effects of reactions themselves—influence scope expansion.
Date:1 Jan 2020 →  31 Dec 2023
Keywords:POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY, MOBILIZATION, COLLECTIVE ACTION
Disciplines:Social movements and collective action, Political communication, Political psychology, Interest group politics, Political representation, executive and legislative politics