WP5, coordinated by the University of Parma, focuses on the comparative analysis of protests and mobilizations that occurred between 2020 and 2025 in five European countries (Hungary, Italy, Romania, Tunisia, and United Kingdom).
The aim is to investigate how, in a period marked by health, economic and migration crises, citizens - particularly those who are disengaged, i.e., distant from or excluded from traditional channels of political participation - have been activated through diverseforms of collective mobilization.
WP5 embracesa mixed-methods approach, combining computational and qualitative methods to collect, analyze, and interpret data on protest events, actors involved, claims, and repertoires of action.
In particular, WP5 aims to build a structured dataset of protest events from national news sources, integrating automated content analysis into a multi-lingual search, thus pioneering the use of a methodology known as "Protest Event Analysis" (PEA). Large Language Models and machine learning techniques will be used to facilitate the extraction and categorization of relevant information.
In addition, we will analyze the media strategies of social movements and protest participants in the period following the onset of the pandemic, focusing particularly on those movements that were selected in the PEA for their high visibility in the media. We will do this through a qualitative-quantitative research design, using social media as sources and in-depth interviews with protest organizers and participants but also with journalists.
The results of WP5 will feed into the interdisciplinary comparison with other Work Packages and contribute to the reflection on individual and collective agency of citizens, inequality, democratic innovation, within an ambitious project that intends to study current forms of participation, mobilization and communication at the transnational level.
