Publications

Concreet bevroegen we twee coronaprotesten die in januari 2022 plaatsvonden te Brussel. Op 9 januari bracht organisator Samen voor Vrijheid zo’n 5.000 deelnemers op de been met hun mars ‘Jaar van de vrijheid’. Twee weken later, op 23 januari, mobiliseerde Europeans United ongeveer 50.000 deelnemers voor ‘vrijheid, democratie en mensenrechten’. Deze betogingen maken deel uit van een bredere golf aan coronaprotest. Het startschot van deze golf ...

Decades of research found that protest participation is unequally distributed over the population. The usual protesters are resourceful, skilled, and politically engaged. We theorize that "open channel" mobilization and mobilization via strong persuasion ties is able to bring unusual protesters to the streets. Additionally, we explore the contextual antecedents of both mobilization types. Results are based on large-scale protest survey data ...

How do political parties react to different signals from society indicating the saliency of a particular social problem? Are all parties equally responsive to all signals or do certain signals prove more effective in engaging some parties than others? We address these questions from an agenda-setting perspective. In particular, we investigate how media attention, protest activity and real-world signals shape parties’ attention for immigration in ...

Media attention is a key political resource for protesters. This implies that journalists are a crucial audience to which protesters seek to appeal. We study to what extent features of protest, of journalists, and of news organizations affect journalists' news judgment. We exposed 78 Spanish journalists to vignettes of asylum seeker protests. Four features were systematically manipulated: protesters' worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment ...

Legislators adapt their policies and agendas to public priorities. Yet research on dynamic representation usually focuses on the influence of public opinion through surveys leaving out other public opinion signals. We incorporate mobilization of the public through protest. Combining insights from social movement studies and political science, we expect protest not to have a direct effect on attention change in legislative agendas. If anything ...