Real world conditions and the agenda-setting impact of protest: A comparative analysis

Transcription

1 Real world conditions and the agenda-setting impact of protest: A comparative analysis Roy Gava, Marco Giugni, Frédéric Varone, Stefaan Walgrave, Rens Vliegenthart, Ruud Wouters and Swen Hutter Paper for ECPR 2014 General conference 3-6 September, Glasgow Abstract: This paper investigates how the impact of protest activities on parliamentary agenda-setting activities is affected by real world conditions, the type of policy issue at stake, media coverage and institutional differences between countries. The research design compares the unemployment and immigration fields in six countries (Belgium, France, Netherlands Spain, Switzerland and United Kingdom) from mid-1990s to the early 2010s. Our analysis suggests that parliamentarians pay more attention to valence issues, such as unemployment, when protest is accompanied by a change in real world conditions. In contrast, the latter make no difference for positional issues such as immigration. From a social movement perspective, these findings suggest that the agenda-setting impact of protest activities is differently affected by real world conditions across policy fields. In addition, we observe differences between consensus and majoritarian regimes in such an impact. 1

2 Introduction 1 While public problems and policy issues are potentially infinite, individual decisionmakers and political institutions have a limited carrying capacity (Hilgartner & Bosk 1988; Jones & Baumgartner 2005). Attention is a scarce resource in politics and issues are permanently in competition for it. The filtering of demands and the prioritization of issues are therefore inevitable. Political institutions and policy-makers process information and react to signals, both external and internal to the political system. On the one hand, crises and unexpected events (e.g. focusing events; Birkland 1998) can shift priorities and open a window of opportunity (Kingdon 1984) for issues that were until then dormant. On the other hand, political actors of all horizons voice their priorities and actively seek to attract policy-makers attention through diverse means. In this regard, protest is among the most visible expressions of issue priorities and public pressure for policy change. It is a resource-intensive vehicle through which non-institutionalized actors attempt to influence the political elites. Nonetheless, in the process of agenda-setting and issue prioritization, protests are in competition for decision-makers attention with a variety of other information signals, such as real world conditions, public opinion, and media coverage. This paper aims to empirically assess the impact of protest activities in defining the policy-makers agenda. If protest influences policy-making, it arguably is more likely to do so at the agenda-setting stage, early in the policy cycle. Once the policy process is under way, it may become more difficult to influence the subsequent stages as a result of more stringent rules and institutional friction (King & Soule 2006). This paper thus investigates the effect of protest activities on the introduction of parliamentary questions by Members of Parliament (MPs). In particular, it examines the interplay between protest and what are called here real world conditions. While public opinion, media coverage, political alliances and institutional opportunity structures have often been considered as mediators or moderators by students of the policy impact of social movements (see Amenta et al and Giugni 2008 for reviews), the role of the real world out there, has been largely overlooked. This is probably related to the fact that this dimension has often been subsumed under the notion of objective grievances. Since grievance theories have largely been rejected in the social movements literature, especially by resource mobilization and political opportunity theorists (but see Buechler 2004; Useem 1998), it is not surprising that this aspect has been generally disregarded. 1 Roy Gava and Frédéric Varone acknowledge the financial support of the Swiss National Science Foundation (Project: Agenda-Setting in Switzerland, ref /1). 2

3 Recent studies indicate that protest has an impact on the allocation of issue attention in Parliament (Vliegenthart et al. 2014). In this paper, we are particularly interested in how the impact of protest activities is affected by a wider context, grasped here through the resort to real world conditions, media coverage and institutional differences across countries. In particular, what is at stake is the interplay between protest events and real world conditions. In other words, if MPs react to protest activities, we are interested in exploring how these effects depend on the objective state of a policy problem, as measured through real world indicators (e.g. a rise in the unemployment rate or an increase in the inflow of asylum-seekers). In a nutshell, we examine the extent to which the impact of protest activities depends on the evolution of real world conditions. We do so by looking at impact of protest on parliamentary agenda-setting in the fields of unemployment and immigration in six West European countries (Belgium, France, Spain Switzerland, The Netherlands and The United Kingdom). Putting protest in their real world context Research on the policy outcomes of social movements has long searched for the existence of a direct relationship between movement activities, including protest activities, and some indicators of policy change. In this vein, scholars have focused on the ability of social movements to be successful and on movement-controlled variables, framing their studies along two main lines of inquiry and attempting to answer one of two basic questions (Giugni 1998): Are disruptive movements more successful than moderate ones? Are strongly organized movements more successful than loosely organized ones? William Gamson s seminal book The Strategy of Social Protest (1990) is exemplary in this regard. Studying a random sample of challenging groups that were active in the U.S. between 1800 and 1945, he found strong evidence for the role of movement-related variables. More recently, scholarship has moved away from the search for direct effects to examine the mediating role of certain external factors. In particular, research has focused on the role of public opinion (e.g. Burstein 1998a, 1998b, 1999; Burstein & Linton 2002; Costain & Majstorovic 1994; Giugni 2004, 2007; Kane 2003; McAdam & Su 2002; Soule & Olzak 2004) and political opportunity structures (e.g. Amenta 2006; Amenta et al. 1992; 1994; 2005; Giugni 2004, 2007; Soule & Olzak 2004). Among the latter, the role of political alliances has often been pointed out as a crucial facilitating factor for social movements to being able to influence the policy process. 3

4 The potentially facilitating role played by these two kinds of external factors is quite easy to understand, albeit different mechanisms could be suggested and have indeed been proposed in the literature. For example, Burstein (1999) makes an argument about the role of public opinion based on the theory of representative democracy. In this view, public opinion would signal to policy makers that an important share of the electorate has a given policy preference or at least demands that something should be done with regard to a given policy issue. The risk of not being re-elected in case of inaction would push policy makers to do something on that issue. Thus, policy-makers might be influenced by public opinion when it represents a sizeable and electorally relevant share of the population, rather than by minority actors such as social movements. Arguments about the role of opportunity structure in general and of political allies in particular are even more straightforward as it is quite obvious that it is easier to be influential for insiders than for outsiders. For example, for a variety of reasons, including strategic ones, political allies might have incentives to carry into the institutional arenas the issues social movements address in the public space by incorporating movements claims into their own agenda. Once they have gained institutional access, movements claims are more likely to impinge upon public policy. Outside the US, few empirical studies have been devoted to impacts of protest activities on parliamentary agenda setting (for a review of US studies, see Walgrave and Vliegenthart (2012: )). Two notable exceptions to American-based studies are Walgrave and Vliegenthart (2012) and Vliegenthart et al. (2014). In the latter studies the authors resorted to pooled-time series analysis to analyze the extent to which the number and size of protest demonstrations affect the attention of MPs (i.e. weekly number of interpellations and questions). In line with previous American studies, the authors substantiated that protests matter for parliamentary agendas, with their impact differing across policy fields. A strong asset of these two studies is the encompassing number (~20) and variety (e.g. from education to agriculture) of policy issues taken into consideration. Nevertheless, the consideration of such a broad number of domains represents an important obstacle to simultaneously account for protest activities and real world conditions. Arguably, the existence of a broad consensus on unambiguous quantitative indicators for measuring problem severity represents a high standard that makes quantitative assessments across issues difficult (Jones & Baumgartner 2005: 208). While specific quantitative indicators are available in some policy fields, it would be hard to argue that a single indicator of reference guides policy-makers at the policy area level (e.g. environment, 4

5 education, health). Some other issues would be simply hard to grasp at this macro-level due to the lack of quantifiable indicators (e.g. foreign policy). While the real world is often hard to capture in terms of available data, there might be additional reasons for the fact that students of the policy outcomes of social movements have almost completely neglected objective conditions. Real world conditions are akin to what social movements scholars call objective grievances. More precisely, they form the basis for the structural stress and deprivation that breakdown theories of collective action have put at center stage. Since resource mobilization and political process theory have largely rejected the assumptions of breakdown or grievance theories, it should not come as much of a surprise that students of the policy outcomes of social movements have not taken this kind of factor into account. We argue that this missing aspect should be taken into account when looking at the agenda-setting impact of protest. Objective grievances might well be irrelevant or at best considered as a constant (McCarthy & Zald (1977) for explaining the rise of social movements and protest activities (but see Buechler 2004; Useem 1998), but should not be discarded from the outset when examining the impact that social movements and protest activities have on policy, in particular at the agenda-setting stage. Scholars working on agenda-setting processes have investigated how objective conditions or real world events impact on the agenda (Soroka 2002; Jones & Baumgartner 2005). These include, for instance, focusing events such as accidents, natural disasters or sudden discoveries that abruptly drive actors attention to a given issue (Birkland 1998). In some areas, the availability of systematic indicators that routinely monitor social and economic conditions (e.g. unemployment and criminality rates) provide policy-makers with a tool to assess the magnitude of public problems and their evolution across time (Kingdon 1984: 90-1). Various longitudinal and cross-sectional studies demonstrated how information about objective conditions available to policy-makers significantly affects issue attention and agenda dynamics (see for example Kleinnijenhuis & Rietberg, 1995 on economic policy; Soroka 2002 on AIDS, crime, environmental and economic policy; Jones and Baumgartner 2005 on crime, economic and welfare policy; John 2006 on urban riots or Van Noije et al on immigration, agriculture and environment). Real world indicators matter thus for political agenda-setting. Objective conditions represent signals that provide policy-makers with information to evaluate the existence, audience and severity of a public problem out there. 5

6 In a nutshell, the interplay of real world indicators with political actors seems highly pertinent when exploring the impact of social movements on the allocation of political attention and agenda setting. This leads to two theoretical expectations. First, the impact of protest activities on the parliamentary agenda is higher if real world indicators indicate an objective increase of the policy problem's pressure. For instance, we expect the impacts of unions' protests on parliamentary activities to be high when the unemployment rate also increases. Similarly, the impact of anti-migrant mobilization should be higher when immigration flows are rising. By opposition, protest activities should have no impact or only a weak impact on the political agenda when real world indicators give a signal to politicians that problems are stable and/or less pressing. Second, while relatively unambiguous quantitative indicators may exist to monitor problems in policy fields, their implications for the impact of protest depend on whether we are dealing with valence or positional issues. The impact of protests on the parliamentary agenda should be higher when everybody agrees that changes in quantitative indicators represent a deterioration of the situation (i.e. valence or non-divisive issues). This implies a differential moderating effect of real world conditions across policy fields: while politicians consider the rise of unemployment a problem (i.e. valence or non-divisive issue), an increase in immigration flows are not necessarily judged in the same way across the political spectrum (i.e. positional issue). While our main focus is on how the agenda-setting effect of protest activities is moderated by real world conditions, we also inquire into the role of other contextual variables. Drawing from previous research looking at the joint effect of protest and the saliency of issues in the public opinion, on the one hand, and between protest and political opportunity structures, on the other (Giugni 2004, 2007), we take into consideration the moderating impact of these two factors. We rely on media coverage to capture issue saliency and on Lijphart s (1999) distinction between consensus and majoritarian democracy as a proxy for political opportunity structures. Although we do not advance specific hypotheses at this stage, we expect these two factors to have a moderating effect on the relationship between protest and parliamentary attention. In sum, we will test for the joint effect of protest and three contextual factors: real world conditions (as measured through the unemployment rate and the inflow of asylumseekers), issue saliency (as measured through media attention), and political opportunity structures (as measured through the majoritarian vs. consensus democracy distinction). We expect these three factors to have a moderating effect on the relationship between protest 6

7 activities and parliamentary attention. In addition, we expect such moderating effect to vary across the two policy fields, that is, depending on the issue-specific context. Research design In order to assess the extent to which contextual factors affect the impact of protest activities on parliamentary attention, we rely on a comparative and longitudinal research design. With regard to the spatial dimension, we focus on six West European democracies in order to capture the classical distinction between consensus (Belgium, Netherlands and Switzerland) and majoritarian (France, Spain, United Kingdom) regimes (Lijphart 1999). Due to data availability restraints, time-periods are different for each country, spanning from the mid-1990s to the early 2010s (see Table 1). In addition, as we discussed above, a comparison between issue domains imposes itself in light of the contrasting evidence found in the literature when it comes to the policy impact of social movements activities. We focus on unemployment and immigration since objective conditions in both domains are routinely and widely monitored through relatively straightforward indicators. These issues allow to capture how the objective policy problem pressure evolves across time in valence (unemployment) and positional (immigration) issues. Furthermore, practical constraints also justify the choice of these two issues: a minimum threshold and variation in the number of protest events is required to quantitatively assess the impact of these on parliamentary attention. Table 1 With regards to methods, we rely on pooled random-effects time-series analysis, where time points are nested in countries. We conduct analyses for the two issues separately. The unit of time is a quarter. While it would be ideal to capture dynamics at smaller time-intervals, for most of our variables of interest data is unavailable or it would display too many low values and/or zeroes. To confront our expectations with the empirical data we have at our disposal we use GLS regression with random effects. The latter allows us to take into account country-level heterogeneity by modelling it as a random term around a common intercept. Level-1 observations are country-issue time units, while level-2 refers to countries. The number of countries is low, but since we are conducting a pooled time-series analysis, this is not problematic. Additionally, to deal with the autocorrelation in parliamentary attention we add a lagged dependent variable. This lagged dependent variable also partly accounts for 7

8 heterogeneity. All independent variables are measured with one-unit lag in order to meet one of the basic requirements of causality: the cause has to precede the consequence. To measure parliamentary attention, we resort to the data collected in the framework of the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP). 2 More precisely, the dependent variable is the relative share of parliamentary questions addressing macroeconomics and immigration issues, in accordance to the CAP s major categories. 3 While institutional differences exist across countries with regards to parliamentary questioning (see Table 1), we are here primarily interested in MPs attention. For our research purposes, these different types of parliamentary questions can thus be seen as functional equivalents. With the exception of Belgium, information on protest activities comes from a longitudinal cross-national protest event dataset (Hutter 2014). For each country included in the analysis, the Monday edition of a national quality newspaper was scrutinized for media reports of protest events (see Table 1). Most of protest activities take place during the weekend and are thus reported by the press on Monday. Focusing on the Monday edition enables to capture a considerable share of the total number of protest events while keeping the labor-intensive data collection process within reasonable costs. In the case of Belgium, protest data come from the content analysis of police records for Brussels, the capital. 4 For all the countries included in the empirical analysis, we rely on the number of protest activities observed for the two policy fields retained. Data on real world indicators come from the freely available OECD.Stat database. 5 As a relative unambiguous indicator for the objective unemployment situation, we rely on quarterly-measured harmonized unemployment rates. For the immigration issue, we rely on annual inflows of asylum-seekers. Note that we also run the model with migration inflows as the real world indicator for immigration, obtaining similar results (not shown here). Finally, we rely on the relative share of media attention to the issues retained for this study as a way to capture issue saliency over time. This is measured through front-page press coverage collected in the framework of the CAP (see Table 1 for an overview of newspaper sources). Media attention to unemployment and immigration is thus captured through the same major categories (i.e. macroeconomics and immigration ) that were used for the assessment of parliamentary attention to different issue domains. It should be stressed that this Note that, due to the lack of a major category for immigration, for UK and Spain the analysis relies on the Rights major topic category. 4 This data has been collected by Ruud Wouters

9 media data and the dataset on protest events have been produced on the basis of the content analysis of different corpora: front-page news vs. entire Monday newspaper editions (on this point, see also Vliegenthart et al. (2014: 9-10)). From an empirical point of view, multicollinearity between these two variables is not problematic: the correlation between media coverage and protest events is relatively low for both unemployment (.14) and immigration (-.08). Results We run two models for each of the two issues (unemployment and immigration). In the first model we only include direct effects with the aim of assessing the impact of our main independent variables (protest, real world indicators, media attention, and type of democracy) on parliamentary attention. In the second model we add three interaction terms, one for each of the moderating effects we are interested in: protest and real world conditions (unemployment rate or inflow of asylum-seekers), protest and media attention, and protest and consensus democracy. Table 2 shows the results for the unemployment policy field. Leaving aside the statistically significant effect of parliamentary attention, which is simply meant to control for the autocorrelation of our dependent variable, we observe a significant effect of both our main variables of interest (Model 1). On the one hand, protest activities addressing unemployment issues have a direct agenda-setting effect to the extent that they lead to a rise in the attention to these issues by MPs. This holds under control of media attention as well as by the other variables. On the other hand, the unemployment rate our real world indicator in this field similarly increases parliamentary attention. In contrast, neither media attention nor the type of democracy (here, consensus democracy is contrasted to majoritarian democracy) seems to play a role. Table 2 Our main focus, however, is on the moderating effect of the three contextual variables (Model 2). The findings indicate a significant effect of the interaction of protest and unemployment rate. This provides support to our expectation as to the moderating effect of real world conditions on the relationship between protest activities and parliamentary attention, at least in this field. Specifically, protest has more chances to lead to increased attention in situations of strong unemployment. We also find a significant effect of protest and consensus democracy, suggesting that the type of democracy matters for the agenda-setting 9

10 impact of protest. Specifically, protest is more conducive to parliamentary attention in consensus democracies than in majoritarian democracies. Finally, the third interaction term is not significant: media attention does not seem to have a moderating role. Do we find similar results when we look at another policy field, namely immigration? Table 3 shows the results for this policy field. They are in fact quite different. Leaving once again the strong effect of the lagged parliamentary attention aside, we observe a statistically significant effect of three out of four of our variables of interest. Firstly, protest activities significantly affect parliamentary attention, although in this case the sign of the coefficient is negative. Secondly, this time media attention also shows an impact, a positive and important one: parliamentarians are more prone to pay attention to immigration issues when the media has also done so prior to that. Thirdly, parliamentary attention for immigration is greater in consensual democracies as compared to majoritarian democracies. In contrast, and unlike for the unemployment policy field, here the real world conditions (the inflow of asylum-seekers) has no effect. When compared to the previous finding, the lack of an impact of the real world conditions on immigration suggests that the nature of the issue matters indeed. Unlike unemployment, which is a valence issue to the extent that people hence also parliamentarians share a common preference with respect to the goals, though not necessarily with regard to the means, immigration is rather a positional issue and therefore a dividing issue both on the means and the ends of policy. In terms of the study of social movement outcomes, this supports previous research that has stressed the importance of issues for the impact of social movements (Giugni 2004). Table 3 Turning to the moderating effect of the three contextual factors, the result are straightforward: none of the interaction terms display a significant effect. Thus, no moderating effect can be discerned in the immigration policy field. Again, this may be traced back to the nature of the issues at hand: protest around position and dividing issues such as immigration can have an impact, but such an impact is not moderated by contextual factors such as the real world, media coverage, and the institutional setting of the country in which it takes place. In contrast, for valence and more consensual issues the context makes a difference. 6 This may be related to the kinder, gentler character of consensus democracies 6 We have also examined the moderating effect of the type of democracy by splitting our sample between majoritarian and consensual democracies (Tables A.1 and A.2 in the Appendix). Without going into the details, these additional analyses basically confirm what we found so far, suggesting that the impact of protest is context- 10

11 towards minorities put forward by Lijphart (1999, but see Lewin et al. 2008). For unemployment, protest predominantly defends the rights of minorities (i.e. the unemployed). In the immigration field, protest is generally against minorities (i.e. immigrants). If consensus democracies are gentler towards the minorities, then we might expect that MPs in consensus democracies react more to unemployment than to immigration protests. Conclusion This paper has examined the role of the context for the agenda-setting impact of protest. More specifically, we have looked at the moderating effect of real world conditions, issue saliency (as measured through media attention), and political opportunity structures (as measured through the type of democracy) on the relationship between protest activities and parliamentary attention. In addition, we have argued that such a moderating effect differs depending on the issue at hand. Our empirical findings, which should not be considered more than tentative at this stage, support our theoretical expectations. Specifically, we have found evidence of a differential impact of protest regarding unemployment and immigration issues. Parliamentarians pay more attention to valence and non-divisive issues such as unemployment when protest is accompanied by a change in real world conditions. In contrast, the latter make no difference for positional and more conflicting issues. A similar observation applies for the context of political opportunity structures: protest activities combine to make parliamentary attention to unemployment issues more likely in consensus democracy, but not so when it comes to immigration issues. From a social movement perspective, our findings provide support to the joint-effect model (Giugni 2004, 2007) as well as to the political mediation model (Amenta 2006; Amenta et. al 1992) of social movement outcomes. However, the aspects that seem to play a role are not necessarily the same. We have in particular shown how the real world may be an important aspect to consider when studying the policy impact of social movements. In addition, we have shown the importance of considering the type of issues. Our findings suggest that real world conditions (here, the unemployment rate and the inflow of asylum-seekers) should be taken dependent and issue-dependent. The type of democracy makes a difference when it comes to the unemployment policy field, but not in the immigration policy field. In particular, we can see that protest activities increase parliamentary attention in consensual democracies, but not in majoritarian democracies, when it comes to the unemployment policy field. 11

12 into account when assessing the agenda-setting impact of protest activities, depending on the policy field. Further work could follow a number of directions. First, it is worth mentioning that our analysis does not capture the fact that information processing is considered to be non-linear (Jones & Baumgartner 2005).When considering the relation between political attention and real world indicators, do policy-makers react to absolute values, symbolic thresholds, or relative change in time? How and why is this different across policy fields? Second, issue specific ownership and government-opposition dynamics may well be explored by disaggregating parliamentary attention. This would allow to address a problem of confounding factors when it comes to the differences observed between institutional settings (e.g. radical right parties in the three consensus democracies of this study). Last but not least, more policy issues should ideally be taken into consideration in order to strengthen the findings. This is certainly a major challenge given the difficulties in finding relatively unambiguous real world indicators for issues in which protests activities are observed. References Amenta, E. (2006) When Movements Matter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Amenta, E., Caren, N. and Olasky, S. J. (2005) Age for leisure? Political mediation and the impact of the pension movement on U.S. old-age policy, American Sociological Review 70: Amenta, E., Caren, N., Chiarello, E. and Su, Y. (2010) The political consequences of social movements, Annual Review of Sociology 36: Amenta, E, Carruthers, B. G. and Zylan, Y. (1992) A hero for the aged? The Townsend movement, the political mediation model, and U.S. old-age policy, , American Journal of Sociology 98: Amenta, E., Dunleavy, K. and Bernstein, M. (1994) Stolen thunder? Huey Long s share our wealth, political mediation, and the second New Deal, American Sociological Review 59: Andrews, K. T. (2001) Social Movements and Policy Implementation: The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty, 1965 to 1971, American Sociological Review 66:

13 Baumgartner, F. R. and Jones, B. D. (1993) Agendas and Instability in American Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Birkland, T. A. (1998) Focusing events, mobilization, and agenda setting, Journal of Public Policy 18: Buechler, S. M. (2004) The strange career of strain and breakdown theories of collective action, in Snow, D. A., Soule, S. A. and Kriesi, H. (eds) The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, Oxford: Blackwell. Burstein, P. (1998a) [1985] Discrimination, Jobs, and Politics. Second edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Burstein, P. (1998b) Bringing the public back in: Should sociologists consider the impact of public opinion on public policy, Social Forces 77: Burstein, P.. (1999) Social movements and public policy, in Giugni, M, McAdam, D. and Tilly, C. (eds), How Social Movements Matter, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Burstein, P., Einwohner, R. L. and Hollander, J. A. (1995a) The success of political movements: A bargaining perspective, in Jenkins, J. C. and Klandermans, B. (eds), The Politics of Social Protest, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Burstein, P., Bricher, M. and Einwohner, R. L. (1995b) Policy alternatives and political change: Work, family, and gender on the congressional agenda, , American Sociological Review 60: Burstein, P. and Linton, A. (2002) The impact of political parties, interest groups, and social movement organizations on public policy: Some recent evidence and theoretical concerns, Social Forces 81: Costain, A. N. and Majstorovic, S. (1994) Congress, social movements and public opinion: Multiple origins of women s rights legislation, Political Research Quarterly 47: Gamson, W. A. (1990) [1975] The Strategy of Social Protest 2 nd ed., Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Giugni, M. (2004) Social Protest and Policy Change, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Giugni, M. (2007) Useless protest? A time-series analysis of the policy outcomes of ecology, antinuclear, and peace movements in the United States, , Mobilization 12:

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15 Soule, S. A. and King, B. K. (2006). The stages of the policy process and the equal rights amendment, , American Journal of Sociology 111: Soule, S. A. and Olzak, S. (2004) When do movements matter? The politics of contingency and the equal rights amendment, American Sociological Review 69: Useem, B. (1998) Breakdown theories of collective action, Annual Review of Sociology 24: Van Noije, L., Kleinnijenhuis, J. and Oegema, D. (2008) Loss of parliamentary control due to mediatization and europeanization: A longitudinal and cross-sectional analysis of agenda building in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, British Journal of Political Science 38: Vliegenthart, R., et al. (2014). The Agenda Effect of Protest. A Longitudinal Study in Six West-European Countries. Walgrave, S. and Varone, F. (2008) Punctuated equilibrium and agenda-setting: Bringing parties back in. Policy change after the Dutroux crisis in Belgium, Governance 23: Walgrave, S. and Vliegenthart, R. (2012). "The complex agenda-setting power of protest: Demonstrations, media, parliament, government, and legislation in Belgium, " Mobilization: An International Journal 17:

16 Table 1: Data overview Country Time period Belgium France Netherlands Parliamentary questions Protest events (protest reports) Media attention (press frontpage) Oral questions and Based on Brussels police De Standaard interpellations archives Written and oral Le Monde Le Monde questions Written questions NRC Handelsblad NRC Handelsblad and de Volkskrant Spain Switzerland United Kingdom 2008 Oral questions El Pais El Pais and El Mundo Written questions Neue Zürcher Zeitung Neue Zürcher Zeitung PM questions The Guardian The Times 16

17 Table 2: GLS regression estimating the effects of protest on unemployment on parliamentary attention (random effects) Model 1 Model 2 Parliamentary attention.481***.472*** (.060) (.059) Protest.002* Unemployment rate.002** Media attention.028 (.085) Consensus democracy (.006) -.016* (.008).002*.097 (.099) -.012* (.006) Protest * unemployment rate -.001*** Protest * media attention (.080) Protest * consensus democracy -.013** (.004) Constant.016* (.008).023 (.008) R2 (overall) N (level 1) N (level 2) 6 6 * p.05; ** p.01; *** p.001 Note: All independent variable include a one-unit lag. Standard errors between parentheses. 17

18 Table 3: GLS regression estimating the effects of protest on immigration on parliamentary attention (random effects) Model 1 Model 2 Parliamentary attention.362***.364*** (.056) (.057) Protest -.001** Inflow of asylum-seekers.000 Media attention.169** (.065) Consensus democracy.013*** (.003) * (.071).012** (.004) Protest * inflow of asylum seekers Protest * media attention (.019) Protest * consensus democracy Constant.014*** (.005).013** (.005) R2 (overall) N (level 1) N (level 2) 6 6 * p.05; ** p.01; *** p.001 Note: All independent variable include a one-unit lag. Standard errors between parentheses. 18

19 Appendix Table A.1: GLS regression estimating the effects of protest on unemployment on parliamentary attention, separating between majoritarian and consensual democracies (random effects) All countries Parliamentary attention.472*** (.060) Media attention.081 (.099) Protest (.006) Unemployment rate.002*** Protest * media attention (.077) Protest * unemployment rate.000 Majoritarian democracies.089 (.084).185** (.071) (.010).004*** (.065).001 Consensus democracies.529*** (.082).115 (.182) -.023* (.012) (.136).001** Constant.013* (.006).015* (.006).023* (.012) R2 (overall) N (level 1) N (level 2) * p.05; ** p.01; *** p.001 Note: All independent variable include a one-unit lag. Standard errors between parentheses. 19

20 Table A.2: GLS regression estimating the effects of protest on immigration on parliamentary attention, separating between majoritarian and consensual democracies (random effects) All countries Parliamentary attention.440*** (.054) Media attention.086 (.068) Protest Inflow of asylum-seekers.000 Protest * media attention (.019) Majoritarian democracies.315*** (.082).121 (.109) (.002) (.026) Consensus democracies.413*** (.080).139 (.120) (.030) Protest * inflow of asylumseekers Constant.020***.023***.015 (.004) (.006) (.008) R2 (overall) N (level 1) N (level 2) * p.05; ** p.01; *** p.001 Note: All independent variable include a one-unit lag. Standard errors between parentheses. 20