After the Storm: Comparing the Determinants of Young People's Protest Behaviour Across South European Contexts

Abstract

Young people's mass mobilisation has been key for restructuring political competition in Southern Europe in the last decade. From a comparative standpoint, this article examines the drivers of protest in Greece, Italy, and Spain. The main results point towards a strong heterogeneity among the three cases: while women and people with left-libertarian attitudes form the basis of youth-driven contemporary street protest in Spain, these findings are partially confirmed for Italy and ruled out for Greece. We argue that protest legacies and trajectories need to go together with politicisation and issue salience to get individual-level correlates of protest activated - however, our mixed empirical evidence suggests that some context-specific conditions intervene in this relationship. Our results point towards a strong heterogeneity in the profile of protesters, inviting us to question the use of Southern Europe as a valid unit of analysis for the study of contemporary social movements and protests.