In a recent publication, TakePart team members Matthias Hoffmann, Felipe G. Santos, and Dan Mercea have explored how individuals’ decisions to participate in protest events link these episodes of protest into events in broader fields of contention. Taking on a relational perspective, the paper argues that by taking part in several protest events, either on similar policy issues or on different policy issues, individuals can occupy a structural brokerage position that allows them to get in touch with distinct populations of protesters, i.e. alters that would otherwise not be in contact. 

Using survey data from a survey fielded by YouGov in 2022, we visualized respondents’ protest participation in the most prominent protest episodes in Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Romania, and the UK as a two-mode network of individuals and protest episodes. This network analytic approach allowed us to identify individuals that occupy distinct brokerage positions, either as boundary spanners that connect other individuals via different protest episodes that focus on distinct policy issues, or via different protest episodes that focus on the same policy issue.

The survey data provided us with the opportunity to query whether these structural positions are associated with different individual properties. Importantly, our analysis shows, that individuals are brokerage positions are more likely to be embedded in social networks, by either having activist friends or being members of civil society organizations. The latter characteristic stood out for boundary spanners, i.e. brokers that can bridge connections between other protesters via protest episodes associated with different policy issues.

In sum, our paper makes an important contribution to relational perspectives on protest, particularly in respect to the multimodality of individuals, organizations, and events that protests bring together.