The Impact of Political Parties on Public Claim Making in European Democracies

ended

Scholars in the social movements literature have usually looked at how forms of collective mobilization (e.g. protest) influence policy and what roles political parties play in this. However, the reverse question of how political parties and policies affect mobilization has rarely been addressed. This project therefore tackles the question of how political parties, rhetorically (i.e. through speeches and manifestos) or by engaging in legislative activities (i.e. proposing and enacting legislation), can affect collective mobilization in certain issue areas in European democracies. Building on the agenda-setting literature, which emphasizes issue attention as the main link between protest and political parties, this project attempts to integrate the social movements and political parties literature and, thus, sociological and political perspectives on collective mobilization and political representation, which have for a long time been disconnected. To assess how parties affect collective mobilization, this project focuses on a new conceptualization of mobilization as public claim making, which departs from the protest-centric paradigm in the literature by incorporating a larger action repertoire and initiator actors. Additionally, in its objective of to theorize and investigate the different ways in which political parties affect collective mobilization, the projects aims to inquire both into how these effects vary cross-nationally and over time, and into the individual-level causal mechanisms underpinning these trends. By reversing the usual question in the literature and focusing on collective mobilization as the main dependent variable instead, this project provides us with a better understanding not only on how and why people mobilize and the role that parties play in this process, but also on political issue priorities and how certain issue areas become prioritized and become more salient or contentious than others.