Protest and Democracy: How Movement Parties, Social Movements and Active Citizens Are Reshaping Europe

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the interplay between protest and institutions during an era of multiple crises in Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Romania and the UK. Focusing on the interaction between citizens, social movements and movement parties, and questions of democratic quality related to participation, competition and responsiveness, it considers the role of traditional and social media when connecting institutional and non-institutional arenas. Building on insights from political science, sociology and communication studies, it combines an original cross-national survey, interviews, media analysis, document analysis, statistical analytical techniques, critical discourse analysis, social network analysis and natural language processing, in a comparative perspective.

Claudius Wagemann is a full professor of political science methods at Goethe University, Frankfurt, since 2012. He also regularly teaches at the School of Transnational Governance of the European University Institute (EUI), Florence, where he also had graduated. Before going to Frankfurt, he has worked at various universities and institutes in Florence. His substantial research interest is on forms of protest and questions related to democracy, as well as on political engagement and political participation, above all of young people. Methodologically, he is an expert in comparative methodology, such as qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and fuzzy sets.

Toma Burean is a political scientist in the Department of Political Science, College Public Administration and Communication, Babeș-Bolyai University. His research interests are political participation, migration, multiculturalism and the politics of gender. He is currently the director of the Center for the Comparative Studies of Migration.

Dan Mercea is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at City, University of London (UK), and the principal investigator on the project “Social Learning to Take Part in Social Movements: Understanding the Social Transformation of Civic Participation” (2023–2026) hosted by Babeș-Bolyai University (Romania) and funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU – and the Romanian Government, under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan for Romania.

Lorenzo Mosca is a full professor of sociology of communication in the Department of Economics and Management, Parma University. He is a member of the teaching staff of the PhD in Sociology and Methodology of Social Research (SOMET) and has worked on several European research projects (Europub.com, Demos, Younex) and won national (FIRB, PRIN) and international (Volkswagen Foundation, Horizon Europe) competitive grants as PI or co-PI. He has collaborated on several occasions with the Istituto Cattaneo in Bologna and the V-Dem Institute (Varieties of Democracy) at the University of Gothenburg as a national expert. His research interests include the sociology of digital media and political communication, the sociology of participatory processes, civil society, political parties and social movements, and populism.

Christina Neumayer is an associate professor at the Center for Tracking & Society in the Department of Communication at the University of Copenhagen. Much of her research revolves around the role of digital media technologies, artificial intelligence and data for political contention, protest, activism, racism, civic engagement, social movements and, more broadly, political communication. Her recent publications include the edited volume The Playful Politics of Memes (with Mette Mortensen, Routledge, 2023).