On May 5 and 6, 2010 Greece witnessed extensive protests including a forty-eight-hour nationwide strike and demonstrations in major cities. Protests were provoked by the passing of three austerity measures by the Greek parliament in February 2010, in March 2010, and finally in May 2010. The measures were part of the conditions for the €110 billion first EU bailout, acquired in order to solve the Greek government debt crisis. These events ended with clashes between the police and anti-austerity protesters, during which the police made widespread use of tear-gas and flash bombs, and made multiple arrests. Three people died when some individuals set fire to a bank branch with Molotov cocktails, and tens of people were injured. One year later, the police once again made use of violence against protesters at the May 11 demonstrations. This was a few days before the Greek Indignant Citizens Movement on May 25, 2011 started to protest in major cities across Greece. In June 2011, in concomitance with the government discussions on the midterm adjustment program and additional austerity measures (the adjustment program was later passed on June 29, 2011), police clashed with demonstrators numerous times – again, making excessive use of tear-gas.

On 24 May 2011, in the middle of the parliamentary debate on the so-called mid-term adjustment plan, yet another round of austerity imposed by Greece’s international creditors, a call for a demonstration at Syntagma Square in Athens and at the White Tower in Thessaloniki appeared on Facebook. By the next day at least 20,000 people assembled in the two squares, mostly chanting “thieves, thieves” at parliamentarians and cursing the Parliament. The movement of the Greek Indignados or Aganaktismenoi was born. It would prove to be massive, expansive, and innovative. Immediately after the initial demonstrations, the main squares in the two cities were occupied, and simultaneous protests began in almost all major urban centers of the country. Interest would focus on Syntagma Square, however, where the occupation was symbolically confronting Parliament, juxtaposing the public assembly and the symbolic seat of political power. In the following days, the occupation grew exponentially, eventually reaching almost 400,000 participants on June 5th. In our dataset, there is an event associated with the Aganaktismenoi on almost every single day until the end of the episode on June 30th.

In the introductory chapter of this volume, we presented our case for studying interaction dynamics between governments, challengers, and third-parties in the “middle ground” because we share Tilly’s (2008: 21) view that this level of analysis offers the “opportunity to look inside contentious performances and discern their dynamics” without losing the opportunity to systematically analyze these dynamics in a quantitative framework. In this present chapter, we further develop this middle ground by presenting a novel method for studying these interaction dynamics. We concur with Moore (2000) that most of the literature on the interaction between governments and challengers is based on cross-sectional analyses using national, aggregate yearly data, which is fundamentally inappropriate for the questions raised about the interactions we were studying. To deal with such questions, we need sequential data that allows us to specify how the different actors react to each others’ previous actions. Such sequential data not only allows us to causally connect all the actions constituting an episode as we have done in Chapter 6, but it also permits us to take a step further and uncover regularities that occur in the interaction between the protagonists of the conflict. Drawing on the construction of action sequences from Chapter 6, we now focus on the relationship between actions and their triggers and examine some of the main themes and mechanisms in the literature on contention politics through this novel methodological lens. In other words, we shall take the mechanism-centered approach from the narrative tradition and marry it with some of the basic tools of time-series methodology to infuse it with statistical rigor. This, in essence, is the dynamic aspect of Contentious Politics Analysis that we put forward in this volume.

So far, we have mapped what the three stylized actors did in the (more or less) contentious episodes, treating all three actors as unitary entities. This chapter takes the analysis a step further by describing features of the coalitions and actor configurations. In doing so, we answer who the actors involved in the conflicts over austerity and institutional reforms were and how they are typically related to each other. Available protest event studies on the Great Recession indicate at least three organizational features of the recent protest wave in Europe (e.g., Carvalho 2019; Diani and Kousis 2014; Hunger and Lorenzini 2019; Portos 2016, 2017; Portos and Carvalho 2019). First, they highlight the crucial role of institutionalized actors, particularly labor unions, in bringing the masses to the streets early on when the crisis hit the European continent in 2008 and 2009. Second, newly established and loose networks played an essential part in the southern European countries hit hardest by the crisis – the Portuguese Geração à Rasca, Democracia Real, and the Indignados in Spain as well as their Greek counterpart Aganaktismeni are illustrative of this dynamic. Third, the moment of such noninstitutionalized players who entered the protest scene tended to be relatively short lived, but, remarkably, even in Spain, there are indications of a process of institutionalization as formal organizations (trade unions and political parties) became more important in later phases of the protest wave.

The previous chapters on interaction dynamics, the central aspect of the second part of this volume, have investigated the determinants of various action forms of the contending parties as a function of preceding action types or contextual features of the episodes. One particular feature of these dynamics, however, has remained unexplored. The flow of interaction between the contending parties does not proceed in a smooth, linear fashion – with one action triggering a reaction that in turn triggers a counter-reaction – as a stylized understanding of contentious politics might suggest. As we have shown earlier in Chapter 6 on the construction of action sequences, the empirical reality paints a more complex picture. While some actions indeed trigger one and only one further action and move the episode forward in that stylized fashion, others trigger two or more reactions, while still others put an end to a sequence and trigger no further actions at all. In other words, some actions have turned out to be considerably more consequential for the remaining part of the episode than others. Our first aim in this chapter is to highlight one type of such actions, in particular those with a heightened capacity to trigger an outstanding number of reactions, and seek to understand the regularities that characterize these actions. We shall refer to these actions as points of opening, inspired by the intuition that they open up contentious episodes to different threads of contention.

At the outset of this volume, we situated our approach between two main paradigms prevailing in the field of contentious politics, taking up the challenge that Tilly (2008) put forward more than a decade ago. One, epitomized by the “narrative” approach, focuses on conventional storytelling, where explanation takes the form of an unfolding open-ended story. The other, protest event analysis (PEA) (see Hutter, 2014 and Koopmans and Rucht, 2002 for reviews), or what we called the epidemiological approach, focuses on a narrower set of action types: namely, instances of popular mobilization in the streets, and primarily relies on statistical techniques to explain the temporal regularities of protest actions or protest waves (Lorenzini et al, 2020). We aimed to accomplish this task by drawing on the programmatic Dynamics of Contention (McAdam et al. 2001) with an eye on preserving the conceptual depth of the former infused with the methodological rigor of the latter. In addressing “the middle ground” favored by Charles Tilly, we applied an analytical approach to the study of the dynamics of contention that allows for the systematic comparative analysis of causal patterns across individual narratives.

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.