The collective action of 'indignant' citizens in Greece: causes, content, agency and implications for policy makers

Since May 2009, Greece continues to face a hardly sustainable debt crisis, accompanied by unprecedented political turmoil. Resembling Cormac McCarthy's main characters in his 'No country for old Men', the socioeconomic and political regime has had to confront 'The Beast', the sheer economic reality. The continuous pendulum between exit and survival has been coupled by storming developments in the party system, significant changes in the country's cleavage structure and an endless series of protests against the Memorandum. Touching upon all sectors of social life, this long period of discontent manifested itself in the 2012 elections, the elections with the highest volatility coefficient in contemporary Europe. A normal distribution in public preferences has been initially replaced by a uniform and later by a bimodal one: the path from a functional democracy to unrest. It is this political setting we aspire to explain, focusing on the causes and consequences of protest activity. What brought people with scarcely any prior experience in demonstrations to Syntagma square? How did parties and individual politicians react to the accumulation of discontent?

We address these questions by following Hirschman's exit-voice-loyalty model. In so doing, we ask the following questions: what drives people from exit to voice and vice versa? How does loyalty manifest itself in the newly emerging political environment? We propose an encompassing analytical framework based on three building blocks: 1) public opinion and change in its political predispositions (the demand-side); 2) political parties and other institutional factors (the supply side); 3) the intervening role of conventional and social media. We propose a variety of design-based identification methods to unpack causal relationships between attitudes, strategic elite behavior, and protest activity. We evaluate competing models of political participation and focus on the feedback loop between populism and protest.