Suchergebnisse

Our analysis explores the rise of the Yellow Vest movement as a collective response to perceptions of growing levels of economic inequality in France whereby collective action is triggered by the perceived illegitimacy of the growing gap between the 'haves' and 'have-nots'. We highlight different psychological processes that might explain why concerns about economic inequality have become more salient. We focus on two dynamics in particular: (a) President Macron's perceived alignment with the elites and disconnection from ordinary French people, and (b) historically dominant collective narratives that frame growing inequality as breaking with long-standing values and norms of equality. Both processes enhance 'us' (the victims) versus 'them' (the elite and those that are not true to national values of equality) categorizations along wealth lines whereby, 'us' becomes a broad category. To explain why the movement continues to go strong, we focus on ongoing intergroup processes (i.e., the police response, lack of support from intellectuals and the middle class) and intragroup processes (i.e., the movement brings together all those who self-categorise as victims of inequality, uniting those that may at other times be seen as 'strange bedfellows'). We conclude that a proper understanding of the way in which economic inequality might divide society creating new intergroup dynamics is essential to understand the Yellow Vest movement.

In social movement research, indignation features prominently as an affect that triggers protest and mobilization. Yet, scholarly accounts rarely unpack the precise ways in which indignation performs these roles, and how it transforms individuals who join mobilization. This article conceptualizes indignation as a moment of affective transformation, based on affect-theoretical insights and drawing on the empirical analysis of the Belgian yellow vest movement (BYV). Building on focus groups, participant observations, and interviews, we unpack the complex affectivity of indignation and the dynamics that underlie indignation in the context of protest and mobilization. We find that indignation enables three affective transformations: (1) it acts as a tipping point that follows from individual feelings of resentment; (2) it is a moment of affective resonance that binds individuals in affective communities, (3) it acts as affective bifurcation from the disempowered state of fear and towards the reclaiming of political power.

There is little scholarship on how gender impacts the construction of leadership in supposedly leaderless, horizontal social movements. In this study, I expand the concept of leading tasks, to get at the ways in which gender intersects with the critical organizing work of maintaining horizontal movements. Drawing on comparative data from 7 months of fieldwork conducted with two grassroots groups in the French Yellow Vest movement, I argue that horizontal organizing in the Yellow Vests (YVM) functions as a gendered structure which opens possibilities for women to take on important leading tasks: caring management, attentive listening, and superintendence. These analytically constructed, gendered leading tasks point to a tension inherent in horizontality: It creates leeway for women's participation, while also functioning as a smokescreen for a process where group members reproduce traditional gendered expectations of women to do a "third shift" in organizing, characterized by nurturing and caring for participants and activist spaces. The study documents how women can be disadvantaged by this mode of organization. Thus, the concept of gendered leading tasks contributes to investigating how leadership is a gendered construct shaped by those who enact it, and the social structure that surrounds it.

Recently, an affective turn in the social sciences has re-appraised the role of affects and emotions in politics. However, the meaning, expressions and political impacts of individual affects still remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose to empirically document the affect of indignation through a qualitative study of the Belgian extenstion of the Yellow Vest (BYV) movement. Drawing on data collected by means of focus groups and participant observations at protest actions, we attempt to define what indignation means, and what its potential political effects might be. We approach theses questions through the notions of "political signifier" and "catalyst" to understand the collective expressions of indignation, and of "resource" to explore its individualities and anchoring in personal trajectories of engagement. This working paper is a starting point on two fronts: it lays the first steps towards the development of "indignation" as conceptual and interpretative framework, and it provides a first layer of descriptive analysis of the many faces of indignation that co-exist within the BYV movement.

Recently, an affective turn in the social sciences has re-appraised the role of affects and emotions in politics. However, the meaning, expressions and political impacts of individual affects still remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose to empirically document the affect of indignation through a qualitative study of the Belgian extenstion of the Yellow Vest (BYV) movement. Drawing on data collected by means of focus groups and participant observations at protest actions, we attempt to define what indignation means, and what its potential political effects might be. We approach theses questions through the notions of "political signifier" and "catalyst" to understand the collective expressions of indignation, and of "resource" to explore its individualities and anchoring in personal trajectories of engagement. This working paper is a starting point on two fronts: it lays the first steps towards the development of "indignation" as conceptual and interpretative framework, and it provides a first layer of descriptive analysis of the many faces of indignation that co-exist within the BYV movement.

The Yellow Vests (YV) movement stands out because of its length and its unusual violent outbursts. This paper aims to better understand the emotional path underlying YVs' intention to engage in more or less radical collective action. To this end, we opposed two models: one based on Becker and Tausch's (2015) model of engagement in collective action – whereby only contempt is supposed to predict radical collective action – and one based on Matsumoto, Frank and Hwang's (2017) ANCODI hypothesis – according to which anger, contempt and disgust as a whole are supposed to predict radical collective action. We assumed that support for the YVs' demands would be associated with negative emotions (i.e., anger, contempt and disgust) towards the government which in turn would foster behavioral intentions in favor of YV. The results (Study 1, N = 677; Study 2, N = 738) confirmed this hypothesis and also showed that the model in which negative emotions (i.e., anger and contempt) are treated separately (i.e., Becker and Tausch's model) presented a better fit with the data. Taken together, these results suggest that negative emotions towards the French president and his government have a key role in understanding the Yellow Vests mobilization.

In this article, I analyze whether the case of the Yellow Vest movement fits Paris Aslanidis' definition of populist social movements, and find that within the discursive theoretical framework Aslanidis adheres to, it does. However, I use the case of the Yellow Vest movement to demonstrate how this discursive approach lacks explanatory potential. I therefore propose moving away from a discursive definition of populist social movements, and advocate for studying political content as a way of detecting common interests shaped by political and societal structures that are shared by participants in a populist social movement. A theory of populist social movements must look at political and economic structures as well as individual agency, framing, and collective identity as a way to explain mobilization. A discursive approach to populism, which only considers language, is therefore not sufficient to explain movements such as the Yellow Vest movement.