As we laid out in the introductory chapter of our volume, we propose a rather ambitious and innovative empirical strategy to study contentious politics – what we label as Contentious Episode Analysis (CEA). Having situated our approach in the intermediate meso-level between the “narrative approach” and the “epidemiological” approach exemplified by conventional protest event analysis (for reviews, see Hutter 2014; Koopmans and Rucht 2002), we aim to accomplish two tasks simultaneously. On the one hand, we wish to preserve the rich ontology and conceptual breadth of the “narrative approach” by distinguishing between a diverse set of actors, actions, and interactions in our empirical design. On the other hand, we aim to leverage the empirical scope and rigor of the “epidemiological approach” of protest event analysis by building a quantitative, cross-national dataset that allows for a variable-based analysis of the unfolding of interactions in contentious episodes. Therefore, in our efforts to preserve the strength (and avoid the weaknesses) of the two extant approaches, the main aim we set forth is to build a dataset that gives an accurate and fine-grained picture of the dynamics of political conflict condensed to a limited set of variables.

Shortly after his reelection in 2014, Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán proposed a new bill that would charge private internet users and enterprises alike for each gigabyte of data usage. Trusting that he enjoyed broad support among the Hungarian public, he may have not expected that this proposal would unleash a massive wave of protests across the country. Starting to organize their collective action in social media outlets on the very day of the government proposal, the protesters quickly spread in masses on to Hungarian streets, sparking broad international media coverage, and even attracting the support of an EU commissioner. While the ruling Fidesz party initially tried to tame the protesters by slightly modifying the proposal in response to the vivid and vocal opposition all across the country, the various challenger actors kept protesting relentlessly against the introduction of the so-called internet tax. Only ten days after having proposed the bill, Prime Minister Orban, in a widely transmitted radio interview, decided to back off. The government proposal was withdrawn, and the internet tax never became part of Hungarian legislation. In a very short period of time and in a country where a political tradition of mass mobilization is largely absent, the Hungarian citizens managed to be heard. The government took their demands seriously and fully responded to their opposition.

Portugal and Spain were among the countries hardest hit by the global financial crisis that led to the eurozone’s near collapse after the revelation of Greek public debt in late 2009. Both countries experienced a massive economic shock, as revealed by objective and subjective indicators (Chapter 3). Faced with a dire economic situation and increasing European pressure, the mainstream left in government – PS in Portugal and PSOE in Spain – announced severe austerity measures throughout 2009 and 2010 (Bremer and Vidal 2018). Consequently, the two countries saw union-organized protests against the measures early in the crisis (Accornero and Ramos Pinto 2015; Della Porta et al. 2017a; Kriesi et al. 2020; Portos 2019). Both countries experienced a turning point in 2011 when further noninstitutional actors entered the scene: Geração à Rasca [Screwed generation] in March 2011 in Portugal and 15M (named after the first large-scale protests on May 15, 2011) in Spain. According to some estimates, almost 5 percent of the Portuguese population took to the streets on March 12, 2011 (Carvalho 2018: 98). 15M and the battle cry of the central organizing network Democracia Real, Ya! [Real democracy now] led, after the first demonstration with about 20,000 participants on Puertas del Sol, to weeks of mass protests across the country.

In the previous chapter, we have looked at the interactions between the three types of protagonists, independently of the context in which they interact. In the present chapter, we shall take context characteristics into account in order to identify the extent to which interaction dynamics are context-specific. In doing so, we shall focus on governments and analyze how their reactions to challenger and third-party actions depend on the context. The next chapter will change the perspective and analyze challengers’ reactions to government and third-party actions. In focusing on the governments’ reactions, we shall build on the analysis of the previous chapter. Concerning the governments’ reactions to challengers, the results found in the previous chapter were quite inconclusive. By and large, government behavior appeared to be independent of previous challenger actions, although the results to some extent supported the threat hypothesis with respect to repression. As far as the impact of third parties is concerned, we found some support for the isolation hypothesis: Governments had a higher propensity to repress challengers when they were not supported by third parties. The most important result, however, was the effectiveness of third-party mediation: Governments tended to honor mediation attempts with concessions. In the present chapter, we shall put these somewhat inconclusive results into perspective by taking into account the context-dependence of the governments’ reactions. In terms of mechanisms, we introduced environmental mechanisms that condition the relational mechanisms that we studied in a “context-blind” approach in the previous chapter.

As the reader may have noted, in the previous two chapters we have treated contentious actions largely in isolation from each other. Our contentiousness indicators, for instance, relied on the relative frequency count of disruptive or repressive action types by the contending adversaries without any explicit consideration of how these actions relate to each other beyond their clustering in time. Likewise, we studied the coalition patterns of contentious episodes by considering the institutional characteristics and action forms of each actor and derived the episode-specific actor configurations from the relative numerical frequencies of these actions.

This chapter departs slightly from the previous chapters and attempts to treat the contentious episodes of one country not only as separate units of analysis but as parts of an evolving chain of contention of a larger campaign that unrolled during the years Greece was under the bailout. In doing so, this chapter delves deeper not into the quantitative aspects of contentious episodes but proceeds in a qualitative fashion and utilizes the contentious episodes as a structured backbone upon which to build a narrative of Greek contention.