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6 Peace Demonstrations or Antigovernment Marches? The Political Attitudes of the Protesters Bert Klandermans 98 Why did so many people bother to demonstrate? The obvious answer seems to be that they were opposed to the war in Iraq, but is this all there is to it? Was it solely opposition to the war, or was it also greater dissatisfaction in general that made people protest against their government? Questions about dissatisfaction are the subject of grievance theory, which attempts to account for the grievances that motivate people to take part in protest. How did such grievances develop, and how are they embedded in the opinions and attitudes people maintain? For a long time, social movement literature neglected the discussion of grievances; the existence of grievances in a society had been taken for granted. It was assumed that grievances abound and that their existence is not a sufficient reason for protest movements to develop. More recently, the formation of grievances again gained attention of social movement scholars (Neidhardt and Rucht 1993; Klandermans 1997). Klandermans (2004) distinguishes between the demand side of participation, which refers to the potential for protest in a society, and the supply side of participation, which refers to the opportunities offered by the protest organizers. Attempts to understand the thoughts and emotions that fuel people’s willingness to take part in political action concern the demand side of protest. Demand for protest begins with dissatisfaction, be it the experience of inequality, feelings of relative deprivation or of injustice, moral indignation regarding some state of affairs, or suddenly imposed grievances (Klandermans 1997). Protest organizations are—more or less—successful in responding to demand for protest, and we may assume that organizations that supply what potential participants demand obtain more support than those that fail to do so. Mobilization is the process that links demand and supply; studies about participation tend to concentrate on this and to neglect the development of demand and supply factors. To take either for granted is unjustifiable. In this chapter, I focus on the demand side of the protest against the war in Iraq. I am interested in the opinions, attitudes, values, and ideologies that characterize the participants; I maintain that motivations to engage in protest are more complex than the proximate goals of a protest event suggests and that this is to be found more so in the case of large-scale events (Oegema and Klandermans 1994). I assume that attitudes in support of protest goals are embedded in broader oppositional sentiments, which have their own histories , as antiwar sentiments have (Neidhardt and Rucht 1993). While they frame the issue they are mobilizing for, social movement organizations try to connect the issues to such broader sentiments. The more successful these attempts to amplify the collective action frame are, the larger the demand for protest in a society will be (Snow et al. 1986). In Chapter 4 of this book, I described how politics of peace and war have evolved since the early 1980s in the eight countries included in our study (see also Ruzza 2004). Typically, antiwar sentiments and support for antiwar and peace protests are more frequently observed among people at the (far) left side of the political spectrum (Klandermans 1991). In chapter 5, it was shown that, indeed, there was a clear mobilization surplus at the left side of the spectrum. Depending on the government in office, antiwar and peace protests can turn into antigovernment coalitions quite easily (Oegema and Klandermans 1994). Chances for such coalitions appear to be highest if the government in office is right-wing. The game becomes more complicated if a right-wing government takes on an antiwar position or if a left-wing government takes on an anti-peace position (Kriesi et al. 1995), but we maintain that the hypothesized mechanism holds in that political context as well. Even in the case of a left-wing government with an antiwar position, I contend that antiwar protest can become large, provided that a more general antigovernment sentiment exists. Hence, the hypothesis I will test more specifically in this chapter maintains that in addition to support for the proximate goal of the demonstration —against the war in Iraq—broader sentiments of opposition account for successful mobilization. In other words, for the demonstration to grow big, more general oppositional sentiments must exist in a country. The more these exist, the larger the demonstration will become. As discussed in chapter 1, standardized for population...

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