From shared grievances to collective action: A multilevel study of economic adversity and protest

Strongly felt grievances are the first, necessary condition for collective action to occur. While social movement studies have explored how activists frame grievances to attract recruits, this study assesses whether the pervasiveness of economic grievances in society affects individual decisions to join protests. Using data from nine rounds of the European Social Survey across 33 countries (2002-2019), multilevel models reveal that the population’s average sense of economic difficulty significantly predicts individuals’ willingness to participate in protests. The relationship holds when controlling for other objective economic indicators frequently used as substitutes for economic grievances in previous research, such as unemployment and GDP growth. Protesters also tend to be wealthier and financially comfortable when there is intense economic distress across society, while protest rates decline among the most aggrieved people. The findings suggest the importance of economic grievances lies on the contextual rather than the individual level: people are influenced to mobilize based on social assessments of others’ economic suffering but are less responsive to their own economic problems.