VOICING OUTRAGE UNEVENLY: DEMOCRATIC DISSATISFACTION, NONPARTICIPATION, AND PARTICIPATION FREQUENCY IN THE 15-M CAMPAIGN*
This article explores frequencies of participation and nonparticipation in the 15-M protest campaign in Spain. Given the nature of this campaign, we focus on democratic dissatisfaction. Our findings suggest that, relative to nonparticipants, democratic dissatisfaction is significantly associated with multiple-time participation, but not with one-time participation. In other words, those who participated only once are not substantially more dissatisfied than those who did not participate. This is remarkable because the “indignados” label and the slogan “Real Democracy Now!” suggest that democratic discontent is a central factor uniting 15-M challengers. Relying on a general survey with questions on different frequencies of participation in the 15-M campaign and on qualitative evidence from two separate rounds of interviewing, we show that not all those who participated, when compared to nonparticipants, were in fact that outraged.
Contributor Notes
* The authors would like to thank the following people for their helpful suggestions at various stages in the development of this article: Lorenzo Bosi, Camilo Cristancho, Donatella della Porta, Enrique Hernández, Jordi Muñoz, Michael Shalev, Sidney Tarrow, the European editors of Mobilization, and three anonymous referees. Earlier versions of this work were presented in seminars at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, the LIVEWHAT summer school at the Scuola Normal Superiore (Florence), the Eighth CIS Summer Seminar at RCC-Harvard University, and the FES conference in Gijón. We are grateful to participants in these events for helpful feedback.
† Martín Portos is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Social Movements (COSMOS), Scuola Normale Superiore (Florence, Italy). In February 2017, he completed a PhD in Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence. Juan Masullo is a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Order, Conflict and Violence Program at Yale University, a PhD candidate at the European University Institute and a member of COSMOS.