The dynamics of class mobilisations: evidence from protest event analysis in Bulgaria and Slovenia

Following the recent interest of bringing capitalism back into social movement studies, this article contributes to the debate with the application of new techniques for examining the dynamics of social class in protest politics. Questioning the declining importance of labour mobilisation in the recent anti-austerity cycles of protest in eastern Europe, I draw on a unique protest event dataset to propose a new way of exploring the relations between social class, repertoires and claimmaking. I show that this innovation can bring greater clarity to a systematic analysis of social class politics in the protest arena. The empirical exploration highlights that more than one-third of the protest events in Bulgaria and Slovenia in the aftermath of the financial crisis were driven by specific social class actors. The article suggests that, contrary to individual-level data, social class can be observed through the basic conceptions of workers and independents; and then through site and sector: production; services; and socio-cultural. These typologies help in understanding where mobilisations arise, under what conditions and for what demands.