The Impact of Protest on Policy-Making in the European Union

Abstract

This thesis examines the impact of protest on policy-making processes in the European Union, with a particular focus on the European Parliament as the EU institution that can be considered most open to mass popular protests. It presents a comparative case study of three of the largest protest movements that addressed specific EU policies in the last 15 years: the protests against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ACTA (2012), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership TTIP (2014-2016), and the EU Copyright Directive (2018-2019), and investigates to what extent and through which mechanisms these protests impacted the policy outcomes for each of the cases. By doing so, this thesis seeks to further our understanding of the way in which protest as a form of mass politicisation of Europe impacts policy-making at the EU level. While many scholars have theorised the potentially constraining effect of the increasing politicisation of Europe over the last three decades, empirical examinations that seek to shed light on the actual consequences of mass politicisation are largely lacking. To address this gap, this thesis draws on literature from the field of social movement studies and constructs a novel theoretical approach to analyse protest impact in the multi-level governance system of the EU. Moving away from static opportunity structure views, this thesis proposes a dynamic approach that focuses on mechanisms of protest impact as a link between protest and policy-makers, and it sets out to scrutinise this link and to trace what is happening when protest succeeds, or does not succeed, in changing the course of a policy. While each case study is centred primarily around the link between protest and the actions and views of Members of the European Parliament, the role of the Commission, the Council and the Court of Justice of the EU are also addressed and contextualised for each case. Employing a process tracing methodology, the empirical evidence in this thesis is primarily constructed by triangulating the analysis of policy documents, protest campaign materials, parliamentary votes, parliamentary questions and debates, and in-depth interviews with Members of the European Parliament. The main argument advanced in this thesis is that protest can impact EU policy-making in a dynamic process made up of interdependent sequences. During this process, protest can contribute to the salience of a policy issue among the public and subsequently change policymakers’ perceptions of the attitudes of the public towards that issue; it can reframe the problem definition of a policy issue in a way which leads to a lasting shift of the policy image that transfers into policy debates and can even change the stance of some policy-makers; and protest can create partisan as well as inter-institutional conflict on the issue, turning some policymakers into political allies. The contributions of this thesis are both empirical and theoretical. It produces comprehensive empirical analyses of the protests against ACTA, TTIP and the EU Copyright Directive, and shows how these impacted the negotiations for the two trade agreements and the Directive, establishing a link that so far had only been theorised. This thesis sheds light on the role of protest as a form of democratic linkage between citizens and policy makers in the EU, and how protest as a form of politicisation on the mass level matters for future European integration. Further, it offers a new perspective on how we can theorise and analyse protest outcomes in systems of multi-level governance generally, and in the EU specifically.