Social issues stood at the very beginning of social movements. Working conditions and food policies, which can be seen as social policy by ‘other means’ (Richards et al., 2016), were—in addition to political freedom—the top issues raised in public protests that marked the beginnings of social movements in the 18th century (Bercé, 1987; Schulze, 1984; Tilly, 2004). For a long time, the workers’ or labor movement was seen as the prototypical social movement. Still today, social issues continue to be a very important topic for protests. Recent protest event data show that more than half of all protests address issues of economic and social public policy failure (Ortiz et al., 2022, p. 45), and even in “post-materialist” societies in the Global North, still more than one quarter of all protests directly address social issues (Daphi et al., 2024). Globally, a large number of major “food riots” (Walton & Seddon, 1994) have accompanied the austerity politics of the 1970s to 1990s. In more recent decades, social policies continue to be prominent protest issues, e.g., in the case of the landless workers’ mobilization in Brazil (Ondetti, 2010) or the student protests in Chile (Carvallo, 2022), and deficient social policies are often seen as drivers of broader protest movements, as in the case of the Arab Spring (Beinin, 2012; Ortiz et al., 2022). For Africa in particular, the African Development Bank claims that “one-third of public protests between 2014 and 2016 focused on salaries, working conditions and unemployment” (African Development Bank et al., 2017, p. 126).

Grievances related to social policies thus continue to be an important source of protest. However, the influence of social policies and, more broadly, structural features of welfare states on protest mobilizations is far from understood. In their overview article in the Oxford Handbook of Social Movements Barker and Lavalette claim that the relation between social policies, welfare systems, and protest activity is “not straightforward” (Barker & Lavalette, 2015, p. 711), and Pritchard (2019, p.35) states: “the welfare state is analytically absent from the literature on protest events”. In other words: While the general observation that protests and social movements can have an influence on social policies and that social policy-related grievances can lead to protests is largely consensual, still little is known about how welfare regimes, the inclusiveness and scope of benefits of social policies, or specific policy changes inhibit or foster social policy-related protests and social movements. The few broad comparative studies mostly focus on a small number of very general macro-variables like GDP (growth), rising/decreasing inequality, demographic change, and political regime type to explain social policy-related protests (African Development Bank et al., 2017;Korotayev et al., 2021; Ortiz et al., 2022).

One reason for this limited perspective is that more detailed information on social policies and on structural features of welfare states had not been available on a global level prior to the broad data collection efforts of the CRC’s Global Welfare State Information System (WeSIS). Another limitation of existing research is the lack of detailed data about protests. Existing studies usually base their claims on very limited protest event datasets that cover only a tiny fraction of all protests (Banks & Wilson, 2024; Salehyan et al., 2012), or they rely on broader, more recent conflict event datasets that do not differentiate between different protest topics (GDELT Project, 2015; Raleigh et al., 2010).

 

Our project addresses these shortcomings on three levels:

We focus on Africa for three reasons: First, from the beginning the CRC’s aim was to strengthen the global perspective in social policy research. While protest activity in the Global North is well-studied, we lack knowledge on drivers of protest mobilization in Africa, particularly with a focus on social policy as a driver of such dynamics. Second, countries on the African continent show strong variation in political, social, and economic conditions and therefore strong variation on the independent variables in our proposed study. Third, compared to Asia, Africa comes with the advantage of only very limited variation regarding the dominant language of available news sources for our data collection of protest events in African countries.

 

The main goal of the proposed project is to systematically analyze for one world region in the Global South how the socioeconomic effectiveness and political integration of social policies affect the levels of contention around these policies, and how the inclusiveness and scope of benefits of social policies interact with other factors like perceived grievances, political and discursive opportunity structures, and resources available to protesters and governments, and thus contribute to higher or lower levels of (nonviolent) political conflict.