SODAS Lecture with Ruud Wouters

Title: Protest and Politicization in the Hybrid Media Arena

Abstract: A key goal of groups staging protest is to kickstart political debate. This protest-induced politicization is the key mediating mechanism that makes protest powerful. In this talk, I first present a preliminary political communication theory of protest influence. Departing from protest as a communicative act, I argue that protest needs two-factor authentication (by journalists and politicians) for it to impact public opinion and legislative processes. I map extant research and its blind spots on a causal chain that goes from protest, over mediatization and politicization, to public opinion and legislation (and back again). I contextualize this causal chain in the current political and communication system: with traditional forms of democratic linkage in decline, protest on the rise, and increasingly volatile citizens embedded in a more hybrid political communication environment, I expect protest to increasingly structure political conflict, driving voter-party re-alignment and cleavage formation. Subsequently, I illustrate sections of this larger causal chain by original analyses of protest event (N=1,277), mass (N= 242,871) and social media data (142,589) covering the case of Belgium (2003-2019). Results highlight the conditions under which protest succeeds to spark, surf or sustain media-issue attention waves;  uncover patterns as to whether and how politicians show responsive to protest on their social media accounts, and link protest induced politicization on social media to mass media agenda setting.  Together, these findings uncover the dynamics of political contestation driven by grassroots mobilization in an era of hybrid media.