The socializing nature of protest events. Consequences of the 15-M protests on participants’ political engagement over time

ABSTRACT

In spite of the widespread belief that firsthand experience with protest is able to change participants’ hearts and minds, the empirical evidence tracking actual changes after participation in protest events is scant and mixed. We examine whether participation in significant protest events increases political engagement in terms of both attitudes (interest, internal efficacy) and behaviors (later participation in demonstrations, overall political participation), and whether these effects persist over time. We use a unique panel survey that covers nine years (2010–2019) and tracks individuals before and after the major protests that took place in Spain in 2011, known as the Indignados or 15-M protests. Our results indicate that participating in the 15-M protests had a positive effect on all the studied political engagement indicators immediately after the protests and, in particular, about two years after they occurred. However, eight years after the protest events, most of these effects had faded.

KEYWORDS:

• Protest
• socialization
• engagement
• 15-M
• Spain
• indignados

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. While ‘short-term’ and ‘long-term’ effects are, in our case, almost default options (defined by the first and last rounds available before the shock of the pandemic), we acknowledge that the choice of a midpoint is somewhat arbitrary. We chose wave 5 and wave 6 as the midpoints. Note that the number of available observations was higher in wave 5 (2013) than in waves 6 or 7 (1,757 and 1,071, respectively, for the number of respondents; 268 and 182, respectively, for the number of ‘treated’ individuals).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación [PID2020-113030RB-I00] and the ICREA Acadèmia programme.

Notes on contributors

Carol Galais

Carol Galais is associate professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Science and Public Law at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain).

Araceli Mateos

Araceli Mateos is associate professor of Political Science at the Department of Public Law at the University of Salamanca (Spain). She is also the director of a Master’s program in Political Science at the University of Salamanca.

Eva Anduiza

Eva Anduiza is currently a full professor at the Department of Political Science and Public Law at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain). She is ICREA Academia Research Fellow, and founded the research group: Democacy, Elections and Citizenship.