The Three Waves of Anti-Austerity Protest in Greece, 2010–2015
| Date | 01 May 2018 |
| Author | Wolfgang Rüdig,Georgios Karyotis |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929916685728 |
| Published date | 01 May 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
685728PSW0010.1177/1478929916685728Political Studies ReviewKaryotis and Rüdig
research-article2017
Article
Political Studies Review
2018, Vol. 16(2) 158 –169
The Three Waves of
© The Author(s) 2017
Anti-Austerity Protest
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929916685728
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in Greece, 2010–2015
DOI: 10.1177/1478929916685728
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Georgios Karyotis1 and Wolfgang Rüdig2
Abstract
The apparent ubiquity of protest in recent years and the rise of Occupy movements across the
world have fuelled claims that a new style of mobilisation is emerging which is markedly different
from previous social movements. Analysing a series of original survey data, this article engages
with this debate by providing a panoramic account of how the anti-austerity movement evolved in
Greece, comparing the drivers of protest in three distinct protest waves. Contrary to expectations,
the rise of the Greek version of the Indignados during 2011 did not decisively transform the
anti-austerity movement that emerged in 2010, which mainly displayed characteristics typically
associated with ‘old’ social movements. However, elements of the ‘new social movements’
approach featured more prominently in the third wave of protest, beginning in mid-2012 and
culminating in January 2015 with victory for SYRIZA, the party which channelled the anti-austerity
movement into the political scene. The model developed to study protest in non-electoral arenas
also performs well to explain the success of SYRIZA in the electoral arena, highlighting the
reciprocal but understudied relationship between mobilisation and electoral politics.
Keywords
protest, social movements, austerity, Greece, electoral behaviour
Accepted: 20 October 2016
Anti-austerity movements have emerged in many European countries since 2010, with
major differences in the experience of individual countries in terms of their strength, their
style and their impact on party politics and electoral outcomes (Pianta and Gerbaudo,
2015). The rise of opposition against austerity in Southern Europe coincided also with
major protest in other parts of the world, including the ‘Arab Spring’ and the Occupy
movement in the US. This apparent ubiquity of protest in the early 2010s has led some to
1School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
2School of Government & Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
Corresponding author:
Georgios Karyotis, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow, Adam Smith Building, 40
Bute Gardens, Glasgow G12 8RT, UK.
Email: georgios.karyotis@glasgow.ac.uk
Karyotis and Rüdig
159
conceive it as a new global movement phenomenon (Castells, 2012; Gerbaudo, 2012;
Mason, 2013), classified as ‘occupy social movements’ (Tejerina et al., 2013) or ‘new
new social movements’ (Langman, 2013). The question that arises is how different these
types of recent movements really are from previous mobilisations.
A prototype example of such a movement emerged in Spain after mass demonstrations
on 15 May 2011, stimulating also the rise of similar ones in Greece, Portugal and else-
where. Inspired by Stéphane Hessel’s essay Indignez-vous! (Hessel, 2010) – published in
English as Time for Outrage (Hessel, 2011) – the so-called 15M or Indignados movement
in Spain attracted mainly young people not connected with any of the established political
actors, such as parties of the left and trade unions, but mobilised instead through informal
networks (Anduiza et al., 2014). The Spanish Indignados certainly seem to fit the idea of
new movements as a form of ‘connective action’ (Bennett and Segerberg, 2013), mainly
driven by young, politically alienated and unattached people, networking through social
media (Castells, 2012).
However, alternative accounts of movement mobilisation elsewhere contradict or at
least shed doubt on the empirical usefulness of this framework. Comparative studies of
anti-austerity protest suggest that, in many cases, traditional left-wing political parties
and trade unions are still prominently involved (Peterson et al., 2015). In Portugal, for
instance, Accornero and Ramos Pinto (2015) found that labour unions were the most
important factor in anti-austerity protest from 2010 to 2013. Similarly, anti-austerity
mobilisation in Greece during 2010 did not fit this new model, mobilising instead a broad
range of people with protest experience, not just the young or the politically detached
(Rüdig and Karyotis, 2014).
Greece, a country severely hit by the economic crisis and experiencing mass protest
against unpopular austerity measures, offers an ideal setting to explore how movements
evolve and how people mobilise in light of the above debates and of empirical develop-
ments. Anti-austerity mobilisation can be found at various stages between 2010 and 2015.
To analyse the development of protest movements over time, the concepts of ‘waves’ and
‘cycles’ are frequently used in the literature. However, the concept of a ‘cycle’ implies an
element of a standard sequence of events which we think is not appropriate here (see
Koopmans, 2004: 21; McAdam et al., 2001: 66–67). We therefore propose to distinguish
between three distinct ‘waves’ of anti-austerity protest in Greece which involve different
mobilisation patterns.
The first wave consists of the anti-austerity mass protest that emerged during 2010 and
intensified after the bailout agreement in May (Rüdig and Karyotis, 2014). The second
wave of protest occurred in 2011 and saw not only a further increase in participation
(Diani and Kousis, 2014) but also an expansion of its activities, notably with the occupa-
tion of central squares by an Indignados-inspired new movement called the Aγανακτισμένοι
[Aganaktismeni] (Mavrommatis, 2015; Simiti, 2014; Sotirakopoulos and Sotiropoulos,
2013). A third wave of mobilisation, from mid-2012 onwards, coincided with a partial
shift of focus from the streets to the electoral arena, with a previously marginal party, the
Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), establishing itself as the main party of the move-
ment (Aslanidis and Marantzidis, 2016).
This article seeks to analyse these developments in Greece, drawing on a series
of original general public attitude telephone surveys conducted by Kapa Research
between 2010 and 2015.1 A first representative survey of the adult Greek population
was conducted in December 2010. A stratified quota sample was used as the selection
method, with one interview per household and quotas defined according to census data
160
Political Studies Review 16(2)
for gender, age and region. Telephone codes corresponding to each region in relation to
its population size were selected, with the remaining dialling digits generated randomly
with the aid of computer software and producing a dataset with 1014 valid responses.
In December 2011, 511 of those respondents were re-interviewed. Despite the rather
large degree of survey attrition, analyses of the background of respondents compared
with non-respondents do not reveal any significant non-response bias. A new repre-
sentative survey was carried out in February 2015, following the same process as the
first one and resulting in 1019 valid responses.
The timing of these surveys and the consistent use of identical questions administered
to both participants and non-participants in demonstrations provide a unique opportunity
to study how the anti-austerity movement evolved over time. More specifically, the aims
of this article are twofold: first, to explore the extent to which the emergence of the Greek
Indignados and the rise of an anti-austerity party changed the nature of anti-austerity
mobilisation in Greece compared to 2010; second, to investigate any links that might
exist between a protest movement and electoral politics by analysing the extent to which
participation in anti-austerity demonstrations was a factor in SYRIZA’s eventual victory
in the January 2015 elections. Before discussing our empirical results and their broader
theoretical and empirical implications, the article starts with a closer look at the specific
context of the three waves of anti-austerity protest in Greece.
Anti-Austerity Mobilisation in Greece, 2010–2015
Social movements seek to shape their political and institutional context but they are
also themselves a product of that same context. As Charles Tilly (1979: 131) noted, the
array of collective actions, or ‘protest repertoires’, which are available to them are
determined and limited by the particular time, place and population of a specific socio-
political and historical context. The first wave of anti-austerity mobilisation in Greece
was a direct response to the introduction of austerity measures in 2010 (Psimitis, 2011).
New official police data, first presented here (see Figure 1), demonstrate the high fre-
quency of protest events (7123) that accelerated after the first bailout agreement was
signed in May 2010. Rather than representing a particular sector of society, protesters
crossed through all ideological divides, professional backgrounds and age cohorts.
Most crucially, in this first phase, factors such as the degree of relative deprivation
were a significant predictor of opposition to austerity and potential protest but were not
conducive to explaining who actually took to the streets. Instead, the most important
factor was socialisation into protest...
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