The project answers to what extent, under what conditions, and with what consequences do parties sponsor protest events? With its focus on ‘party protests’, the project challenges analytical attributions of collective actors to specific sites of mobilization (i.e., social movements to the protest arena versus political parties to the electoral arena).

Studying parties’ decisions to protest advances our understanding of the coupling and operational logics of different arenas, and it bridges the gap between social movement studies and research on elections and party competition. The research design combines (i) a large-N study of party protests in 30 countries with (ii) case studies of selected moments of intense party-movement interactions. The case studies focusing on parties from the left and right will be used to better detect and measure the mechanisms behind significant relationships in the large-N study.