A_06 Local Protests and Cohesion in a European Comparison

Protests are a form of political participation that has increasingly become part of everyday political life in Western democratic societies. They can function both as expressions of voice — and thus as signs of lived democracy—and as exit-reactions in the sense of a withdrawal from democratic institutions and participatory processes. Protests can articulate specific social conflicts. However, not all issues are equally suitable for successful protest mobilization, and not all population groups rely on protest to the same degree. Moreover, whether and how protests are mobilized depends heavily on existing political opportunity structures and traditions.

In this work package (WP), we conduct protest monitoring and examine, in a European comparison, which issues and groups are represented in local protests in the aftermath of recent crises (2010—2025) and how these protests affect local cohesion. Specifically, we comparatively analyze local protests in three European countries—Germany, Hungary, and France—between 2010 and 2025. For many years, research has neglected local protest dynamics in favor of analyzing protest events at the national level. However, it has become clear that local conflicts and politics do exert influence—not only on political attitudes and patterns of participation at the local level, but also on national political debates, attitudes, and decisions.

Our comparative analysis takes into account local, national, and international contextual factors of local protests. On the one hand, we assume that local protests are driven by local or national constellations of conflict. At the same time, our period of investigation includes three global or European crises that we assume have (re)structured lines and constellations of conflict in all countries under study: the climate crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. With regard to these crises, we compare local protest mobilizations and public discourses in each context.

The WP contributes to answering central questions of Focus Area 3. With regard to the effects of participation on cohesion, we ask, first: how and under what conditions do protests at the local level strengthen democratic cohesion?

The potential contribution to democratic cohesion is examined at three levels:

• Ideational level: the democratic claims and ideals expressed in protests;
• Integrative level: the expansion of democratic forms of participation and the inclusion of underrepresented issues and groups in the democratic process;
• Relational level: changes in patterns of cooperation and increasing cross-sectoral collaboration among local civil society actors.

Second, we examine the question of how and under what conditions protests at the local level weaken democratic cohesion. This question is also analyzed across the same three levels:

• Ideational level: by spreading anti-democratic tendencies and political mistrust;
• Integrative level: by contributing to greater exclusion from political processes and intensifying the polarization of conflicts;
• Relational level: by impeding cross-sectoral civil society cooperation.

Beyond this, we also investigate the reverse direction of causality—from cohesion to political participation—and ask how the rise of right-wing populist and anti-democratic actors and their conceptions of ethnically defined and exclusionary cohesion affect local protest activity. These questions are examined both over time and in cross-national comparison.