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6 Issue Divides in the Protest Arena: The Comparative Picture This chapter traces the questions of how the issue divides in the protest arena differ across countries and whether these differences can be linked to the relatively stable aspects of the political context faced by protestors, that is, to the strength of the traditional class cleavage and the way the new cleavages manifested themselves in more institutionalized political arenas. Does the strength of the traditional class cleavage negatively or positively affect the salience of conflicts over globalization in protest politics? Are protests over globalization most salient and polarized in countries where the integration–demarcation cleavage has most fundamentally transformed electoral politics? To answer these questions and to highlight the specific patterns found for the integration –demarcation cleavage, this chapter focuses not only on the three globalization issues but also on cultural liberalism, the main issue associated with the new class cleavage that restructured Western European politics in the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, the chapter takes up Kriesi and Duyvendak’s (1995) analysis of the impact of the old class cleavage on the salience of new social movement issues. However, this question is answered by relying on an extended sample of countries and by focusing on the period from 1975 to 2005. The chapter is structured as follows.The first section presents the hypotheses about cross-national differences. Simply stated, I expect that protests over cultural liberalism were most salient in countries with a weak traditional class cleavage and where the new left-libertarian challengers were comparatively successful in restructuring institutionalized politics (see della Porta and Rucht 1995; Kitschelt 1988; Kriesi and Duyvendak 1995). The situation becomes more complicated when we turn to protests over globalization. On 97 98 issue divides in the protest arena: Comparative Picture the one hand, the literature offers contrasting hypotheses on the relationship between traditional cleavages and the salience of globalization conflicts (see della Porta 2007a; Kriesi 2008). On the other hand, the strength of the integration–demarcation cleavage in institutionalized terms is not consistently related to the strength of the old class cleavage. Thus, I end up with three differing sets of hypotheses. In the following sections, these hypotheses are empirically examined. At first, the focus is on the salience of cultural and economic issues in general, before the following two sections zoom in on cultural liberalism and the three globalization issues. The findings confirm the hypothesis on the salience of cultural liberalism in the 1970s and 1980s, but the salience of the globalization issues is not systematically related to the two context factors. However, conflicts over immigration in the protest arena tend to be more polarized in countries where the changes induced by the integration–demarcation cleavage are comparatively weak in the electoral arena. The final section takes up this finding and highlights how conflicts over immigration differ across countries. More specifically, I rely on Zald and Useem’s (1987) distinction of closely and loosely coupled tangos of mobilization and demobilization to describe the cross-national patterns (chapter 2). Expected Country Differences In the following, the theses on the relationship between electoral and protest politics are linked with the empirical results on the strength of the traditional class cleavage and the institutionalized strength of the new cleavages. As shown in chapter 3, the two context factors are closely related when it comes to the left-libertarian round in the 1970s and 1980s: a strong traditional class cleavage was related to weak left-libertarian challengers and less salient conflicts over cultural liberalism in institutionalized political arenas at the time. Thus, the expectations about the salience of cultural liberalism in the protest arena do not differ according to the two context factors. More specifically, I expect that protests related to cultural liberalism are most salient in countries where the class cleavage was comparatively weak but the new issues and actors were comparatively strong in institutionalized arenas (see Figure 21).This is expected to be the most favorable context for protests over cultural liberalism. On the one hand, if the old class cleavage was still very powerful in shaping individuals ’ loyalties and actions, the breakthrough of the new issues and organizations should be blocked (as has already been shown by others, for example, della Porta and Rucht 1995; Kitschelt 1988; Kriesi and Duyvendak 1995). On the other hand, I expect to find congruent patterns of change in electoral and protest politics because the driving forces of change were closely associated with the political left (see chapter 2...

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