Project R-16936

ERC BOF ZAP mandate - Ruud Wouters (Research)

With advanced democracies facing a "crisis of representation" and protest on the rise, PROPEL considers the interplay between protest and public opinion (PPO) as a key force shaping the future of democratic politics. PROPEL scrutinizes the impact of protest on public opinion, in its most consequential form being the party preferences citizens hold. PROPEL asks: What is it in public opinion that gets affected by protest? And, when and how does this impact materialize? To address these questions, PROPEL develops an original political communication theory of PPO impact. Presented as a causal chain, the theory takes the features of protest (size, disruption, organizer, claim), the mechanisms of mediatization (mass and social media) and politicization (reactions of political actors in the public sphere), and the features of citizen receivers (predispositions) into account as key factors driving four kinds of PPO effects (issue-specific, system-generic, group-identity and party preference). Empirically, PROPEL leverages an ambitious three stage research approach, moving from the first large N analysis of PPO impact by means of systematically mining extant protest and survey data, over unique tailored panel surveys tackling upcoming protest events, to full control experimental designs unrivalled in drawing causal inferences. Together, this threefold approach overcomes the case-study, sampling and exposure biases plaguing current work, moving the field from whether protest matters, to when and how it does. Doing so, PROPEL investigates the implications of protest in an era of shifting cleavage politics and assesses how an increasingly relevant means of democratic linkage deepens or endangers democracy as we know it.

16 August 2026 - 15 August 2027