Belgium

Yet, as said, in the study of non-conventional politics, this role of ‘issue-specific opportunities is far less explored, although, as Meyer and Minkoff (2004: 1461) acknowledge, it is obvious that ‘[w]hat provokes mobilization for one movement or constituency may depress mobilization of another, and be completely irrelevant to a third’. Verba et al (1995) specify the peculiar importance of issues by referring to them as ‘theoretical wildcards’ in their renowned Civic Voluntarism model, arguing that: “as issues come and go, they mobilize to politics different issue publics” (Verba et al. 1995: 522). Mobilizing issues not only link micro-level participation to movement types (e.g. ‘old’ versus ‘new’ social movements), and to politics and society (e.g. are they political issues, partisan issues,…); they also shape the micro-level, or demand side of protest (e.g. are they reacted upon in an instrumental or ideological way, or do they appeal to moral sentiments or a sense of collective identity…).

The reason for this meager attention to the importance of mobilizing issues is in essence methodological. Non-conventional participation is studied either using case studies, or using large-scale survey data; the first do take into account issue-contexts, but mostly lack comparability; the second are the paragon of comparative research, but the importance of the concrete issues people are effectively participating for is not taken into account, leading to the leveling-out of the data to the largest mean. Using the protest survey dataset gathered by all national teams, which will contain about 70 demonstrations on a variety of issues, and including national context variables as controlling variables, we can not only clarify the way in which different issues attract different issue publics, in different ways, with different motivations, but also the way in which they are embedded within different organizational backgrounds of different strengths and political weight. In other words, we expect that different issues produce different logical constellations in the ‘who’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ of protest participation. Accordingly, we can assess the relative importance of issues in attracting more or less experienced protesters, assuming that some issues (like e.g. peace, third world,…) are more universal and inherently more longer-term than more immediate and particularistic issues like for instance corporate closedowns. Also questions on protest issues’ capacity to mobilize more or less diverse publics, and the way in which they are able to produce bonding (in-group) or bridging (between-group) social capital can be tested (Putnam 2000). Finally, next to determining the discerning importance of issues on a range of variables, we can also test if, beyond or across issues, there do exist universal logics in and pathways to participation; if there, in other words exist some stable relations between the ‘who’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ of participation that are universally sound predictors of protest participation. In the figure below we situate the Belgian proposal within the general proposal.