Teodora Gaidyte
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Sociology, Graduate Student
Social inequality is a key recurring theme animating various protest movements over the past decade. Take, for example, the Occupy Wall Street movement conceived by many as a new global movement phenomenon. Others, however, maintain that... more
Social inequality is a key recurring theme animating various protest movements over the past decade. Take, for example, the Occupy Wall Street movement conceived by many as a new global movement phenomenon. Others, however, maintain that these demonstrations displayed characteristics typical of “old” social movements. We argue that in order to understand differences between old and new movements, it is necessary to compare Occupy protests with other contemporaneous anti-austerity protests, as demonstrators in both protested against stark inequality following the financial meltdown. To do so, we rely on the Caught in the Act of Protest data where data were collected at actual demonstrations at Occupy protests and anti-austerity protests between 2009 and 2012. We examine sociodemographics (the who of protest), motivational dynamics (the why of protest), and mobilization dynamics (the how of protest). We find that the two types of demonstrations brought different crowds into the street...
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This article investigates the effects of social trust, both direct and mediated – via internal and external efficacy – on different forms of political participation in post-communist Lithuania. The relationship between social trust and... more
This article investigates the effects of social trust, both direct and mediated – via internal and external efficacy – on different forms of political participation in post-communist Lithuania. The relationship between social trust and participation features prominently in the social capital and civic culture literature, but little empirical evidence exists that supports it, especially in post-communist democracies. We use the Lithuanian National Elections Study 2012 to test our hypotheses and replicate our analysis with the European Social Survey waves of 2014 and 2016. Our results show that social trust increases turnout, because it is related to a sense of external efficacy, which in turn enhances the likelihood that people vote. There is, however, no association between social trust and being involved in other institutionalised politics, namely, working for a political party. Interestingly, we find a positive indirect effect for non-institutionalised political participation: soc...
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The #FridaysForFuture climate protests mobilized more than 1.6 million people around the globe in March 2019. Through a school strike, a new generation has been galvanized, representing a historical turn in climate activism. This wave of... more
The #FridaysForFuture climate protests mobilized more than 1.6 million people around the globe in March 2019. Through a school strike, a new generation has been galvanized, representing a historical turn in climate activism. This wave of climate protest mobilization is unique in its tactics, global scope and appeal to teenage school students. Media coverage of these protests and high-level national and international political meetings involving the movement’s icon, Greta Thunberg, illustrate a level of global attention that no previous youth movement has ever received. A team of social scientists from universities across Europe1 organized a survey of the global FFF strike events on March 15. The team surveyed protesters in 13 cities in nine European countries using the same research design to collect data, following the well-established protest survey methodology used previously in the “Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation” (CCC) project.
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The #FridaysForFuture climate protests mobilized more than 1.6 million people around the globe in March 2019. Through a school strike, a new generation has been galvanized, representing a historical turn in climate activism. A team of... more
The #FridaysForFuture climate protests mobilized more than 1.6 million people around the globe in March 2019. Through a school strike, a new generation has been galvanized, representing a historical turn in climate activism. A team of social scientists from universities across Europe organized a survey of the global FFF strike events on March 15. The team surveyed protesters in 13 cities in nine European countries using the same research design to collect data, following the well-established protest survey methodology used previously in the "Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation" (CCC) project.
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This article investigates three explanations for electoral support for the far right – ‘cultural backlash’, ‘economic grievances’ and ‘protest voting’ – in a novel way. Our main contribution is that we contrast far-right voters with... more
This article investigates three explanations for electoral support for the far right – ‘cultural backlash’, ‘economic grievances’ and ‘protest voting’ – in a novel way. Our main contribution is that we contrast far-right voters with voters of centre-right parties, traditional left-wing parties and abstainers. Equally innovative is the comparison between mature and post-communist democracies. Using European Social Survey data (2014–16), we conclude that anti-immigration attitudes are most important in distinguishing far-right voters from all other groups. Yet, these differences are significantly smaller in Eastern Europe. Furthermore, far-right voters are not the so-called socioeconomic ‘losers of globalization’: this is only true when compared with centre-right voters. Concerning protest voting, distrust of supranational governance particularly enhances far-right voting. Overall, our study concludes that more fine-grained distinctions pay off and avoid misleading generalizations abo...
Research Interests: Eastern European Studies, Voting Behavior, Political Parties, Political Science, Political Extremism/Radicalism/Populism, and 8 morePopulism, Elections and Voting Behavior, Electoral Studies, Radical Right, far-right politics Europe, Radical Right-wing Populist Parties, Extreme and Far Right, and Government-opposition interaction
We investigated whether income gaps in voting turnout vary with country-level economic inequality, and whether this pattern differs between wealthier and less-wealthy countries. Moreover, we investigated whether the prevalence of... more
We investigated whether income gaps in voting turnout vary with country-level economic inequality, and whether this pattern differs between wealthier and less-wealthy countries. Moreover, we investigated whether the prevalence of clientelism was the underlying mechanism that accounts for the presumed negative interaction between relative income and economic inequality at lower levels of national wealth per capita. The harmonised PolPart dataset, combining cross-national surveys from 66 countries and 292 country-years, including 510,184 individuals, was analysed using multilevel logistic regression models. We found that the positive effect of relative income on voting was weaker at higher levels of economic inequality, independent of the level of national wealth. Although clientelism partially explains why economic inequality reduces the income gap in voter turnout, it does not do so in the way we expected. It seems to decrease turnout of higher income groups, rather than increase tu...
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This article investigates three explanations for electoral support for the far right-'cultural backlash', 'economic grievances' and 'protest voting'-in a novel way. Our main contribution is that we contrast far-right voters with voters of... more
This article investigates three explanations for electoral support for the far right-'cultural backlash', 'economic grievances' and 'protest voting'-in a novel way. Our main contribution is that we contrast far-right voters with voters of centre-right parties, traditional left-wing parties and abstainers. Equally innovative is the comparison between mature and post-communist democracies. Using European Social Survey data (2014-16), we conclude that anti-immigration attitudes are most important in distinguishing far-right voters from all other groups. Yet, these differences are significantly smaller in Eastern Europe. Furthermore, far-right voters are not the so-called socioeconomic 'losers of globalization': this is only true when compared with centre-right voters. Concerning protest voting, distrust of supranational governance particularly enhances far-right voting. Overall, our study concludes that more fine-grained distinctions pay off and avoid misleading generalizations about 'European far-right voters' often presented in public debates.
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This article aims to analyse and theorize the peculiarities of trust in mature and post communist democracies. First, the article conceptualizes the notion of trust as interpreted by the culturalist and rationalist approaches, and... more
This article aims to analyse and theorize the peculiarities of trust in mature and post communist democracies. First, the article conceptualizes the notion of trust as interpreted by the culturalist and rationalist approaches, and systemizes it into a more coherent theoretical framework. Second, social and political trust are discussed and the relationship between these is analysed. Third, the dialectics of political trust and liberalism is tackled. Finally, trust in the communist regime and aftermath is examined. The main argument is that, at the societal level, social trust in post-communist societies is limited to particularized trust; it is more family-centred as compared to the wider radius of generalized trust in mature democracies. Meanwhile political trust in post-communist societies is less self-reflexive, since, unlike in the older democratic societies, it has evolved in counterpose to fear, rather than to risk.
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Why are people in post-communist countries less politically active than in mature democracies? Just before and after the collapse of Communism, the new democracies witnessed a massive political engagement of citizens, be it in... more
Why are people in post-communist countries less politically active than in mature democracies? Just before and after the collapse of Communism, the new democracies witnessed a massive political engagement of citizens, be it in demonstrations or elections. The recent years, however, reveal the political passivity of post-communist citizens. It begs the question which factors are responsible for disenchantment from politics. More specifically, we ask whether the communist legacy of political apathy and the economic and political conditions of post-communist societies matter for individuals’ decisions to engage in politics. We expect three sets of individual and contextual predictors to be related to political participation, namely, economic, political and cultural ones. We employ the European Social Survey 2008 data and use multi-level regressions to test our hypotheses. On the one hand, political participation in post-communist democracies is explained by a so-called composition effect: because there are more people in post-communist countries of a certain socio-economic status and with certain political values, levels of participation are lower. On the other hand, we found that political engagement is also shaped by country-level factors. The novelty of our research is that we consider social trust at both individual and contextual levels as predictors of both institutionalized and non-institutionalized political participation. Our results support the claim that the deterioration of social trust in post-communist countries during the communist regime and after its fall has a profound negative impact on individuals’ willingness to participate in politics.