Social Movement Mobilization under Right and Left Governments: A Look at Four West European Countries

This paper analyzes the impact of changing political opportunities, and more particularly of changes in the composition of government, on the levels, political leaning and forms of protest mobilization. The literature provides us with contradictory expectations as to these questions, some stressing openess of the political system, some closure, and some a combination of openness and closure as the situation most conducive to protest mobilization. To assess these hypotheses, we use data on protest events in four West European countries (Germany, France, Great Britain and the Netherlands) for the period 1975-1979, as well as similar data derived from another project on protests in Germany between 1950 and 1991. Altogether, this provides us with data on protest mobilization (differentiated in left-wing and other protest) under fifteen different governmental constellations, which can roughly be classified as left, right and mixed. The data show, first, that mobilization by left-wing movements in Western Europe by far exceeds mobilization by the Right. Second, the mobilization of left-wing movements is concentrated during periods of right-wing government, whereas the Right tends to mobilize most strongly when the Left is in power. However, the highest levels of mobilization, of the Left and to some extent also of the Right, occur when mixed governments, in which power is shared by parties of the Left and of the Right, are in power. Self-evident as some of these results may seem at first sight, they run against the thrust of much of the recent social movement literature. In particular they make clear that in order to explain fluctuations in levels of social movement mobilization we should not only take into account (positive) opportunities for protest, but also its necessity from the point of view of potential activists and its relative attractiveness compared to more conventional ways of pressuring governments. In this view, the most conducive situations for mobilization are those in which protest seems both opportune and necessary; a situation that for instance prevails when mixed, often internally divided governmeents are in power. Zusammenfassung In diesem Papier wird der Einfluß von wechselnden politischen Chancenstrukturen,