Protest as a relational field: An analysis of brokerage positions within and across contentious episodes and the individuals occupying them

This paper analyses participation in multiple protest episodes to explore the potential for people to broker relations between same-issue and different-issue episodes. Through an analysis of original survey data from six European countries, we map two-mode networks of individuals and protest episodes in each country to identify protesters in two brokerage positions: coordinators that can broker relations via same-issue contentious episodes and boundary spanners, that can broker relations via different-issue episodes. Combining network and regression analysis, we identify the individuals occupying such positions and characterize their protest participation. We find that embeddedness in different types of activist networks is the most important predictor of brokerage positions. However, the two brokerage positions are associated with different types of embeddedness. By fleshing out the importance of individuals in shaping contentious fields, we offer a unique insight into protest networks, thus advancing the sociological understanding of collective action with an innovative mixed-methods design.