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Results presented in this article have been obtained within the projects (1) Disobedient Democracy: A Comparative Analysis of Contentious Politics in European Semi-periphery (DISDEM), funded by Swiss National Science Foundation [grant number IZ11Z0_166540], and (2) The Evolution of Spanish Contention: A Longitudinal Analysis of Social Movements and Protest, 2000-2020 (ECOPOL), funded by Spanish State Research Agency [grant number PID2019-104078GB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033].

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Santana, AndresAuthor

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Marching and voting: The electoral protest cycle

Publicated to:SOCIAL SCIENCE JOURNAL. - 2023-06-22 (), DOI: 10.1080/03623319.2023.2222881

Authors: Aguilar, Susana; Santana, Andres; Romanos, Eduardo

Affiliations

Univ Autonoma Madrid, Ciencia Polit, Madrid, Spain - Author
Univ Complutense Madrid, Fac Ciencias Polit & Sociol, Dept Sociol Aplicada, Campus Somosaguas, Madrid 28223, Spain - Author
Univ Complutense Madrid, Sociol Aplicada, Madrid, Spain - Author

Abstract

Social movements studies have analyzed how the protest affects the electoral agenda and the outcome of elections. Here, we reverse this approach and analyze whether the electoral cycle affects the protest. With the aid of a new dataset that contains all the demonstrations and marches in Spain from 2000 to 2020 (N = 2,255), we test whether the size of the protest is influenced by the proximity of general elections. As elections offer social movements a political opportunity to air their grievances and make their demands visible to political contenders and the public, we test an electoral protest cycle hypothesis whereby the number of participants in protest events will increase as election day draws nearer. Our results confirm the existence of an electoral protest cycle, even after controlling for potential confounders such as the type of organizers, the claims of the protest, the ideology of the government, and city size.

Keywords

AgendaAntinuclear movementsDemonstrationsElectionsGovernmentImpactMediaPolicyPoliticsProtestProtest event analysisSocial movementsSocial-movementsSpainUnited-states

Quality index

Bibliometric impact. Analysis of the contribution and dissemination channel

The work has been published in the journal SOCIAL SCIENCE JOURNAL due to its progression and the good impact it has achieved in recent years, according to the agency WoS (JCR), it has become a reference in its field. In the year of publication of the work, 2023, it was in position 70/267, thus managing to position itself as a Q2 (Segundo Cuartil), in the category Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary. Notably, the journal is positioned en el Cuartil Q2 para la agencia Scopus (SJR) en la categoría Sociology and Political Science.

Impact and social visibility

From the perspective of influence or social adoption, and based on metrics associated with mentions and interactions provided by agencies specializing in calculating the so-called "Alternative or Social Metrics," we can highlight as of 2025-06-19:

  • The use, from an academic perspective evidenced by the Altmetric agency indicator referring to aggregations made by the personal bibliographic manager Mendeley, gives us a total of: 4.
  • The use of this contribution in bookmarks, code forks, additions to favorite lists for recurrent reading, as well as general views, indicates that someone is using the publication as a basis for their current work. This may be a notable indicator of future more formal and academic citations. This claim is supported by the result of the "Capture" indicator, which yields a total of: 4 (PlumX).

With a more dissemination-oriented intent and targeting more general audiences, we can observe other more global scores such as:

  • The Total Score from Altmetric: 4.4.
  • The number of mentions on the social network X (formerly Twitter): 6 (Altmetric).