At the Ballot Boxes or in the Streets and Factories: Economic Contention in the Visegrad Group

At the Ballot Boxes or in the Streets and Factories:

Economic Contention in the Visegrad Group

Ondřej Císař and Jiří Navrátil

Introduction

As demonstrated by recent social movement research as

well as by the contributions in this very volume,

economic contention is coming to the fore of scholarly

attention as a result of popular reactions to the current

recession and the related austerity policies introduced

in many countries across the globe (but see, for example,

Kousis and Tilly 2005). In this chapter, we broaden this

crisis-focused perspective and look at a longer time

period in four countries that were affected by the crises

of economic transformation and austerity packages well

before the current wave.

The goal of this chapter is to analyse protest on

issues of economy, welfare, and social policies

(hereinafter ‘economic protest’) in four very similar

national environments: the Czech Republic, Slovakia,

Hungary, and Poland, the so-called Visegrad Group (V4).

In many respects, these countries represent a uniform

pattern of post-communist transformation, in both

political and economic terms. They are typically taken as

four cases of a single model of transition political

economy, which is currently conceptualized as the

embedded neoliberal regime (Bohle and Greskovits 2012).

Accordingly, their pattern of collective action has thus

far been captured and explained by a single narrative

that starts with the quiescent 1990s (Greskovits 1998;

Vanhuysse 2006) and is followed by the end to patience

brought about by the current Great Recession (Kriesi

2014; Beissinger and Sasse 2014). In contrast to this

perspective, the present chapter analyses the variegated

level of economic protest across the selected countries

and the dynamics of protest within them.

First, we explore the dynamics of economic protest

in the four countries in the last 20 years, looking at

grievances and most importantly the political dynamics

behind protests. Second, we look at the difference in the

protest magnitude across them. Probably surprisingly,

given the usually uniform treatment of these countries in

terms of the level of economic protest, they do not form

a homogeneous group; in fact, the Czech Republic and

Slovakia are far less contentious than Hungary and

Poland. Since the available theories do not seem to

explain this difference, the main goal of this chapter is

to develop, using a comparative method, a theoretical

argument explaining the variegated level of economic

protest across the countries. We argue that the

explanation must be sought in the overall structure of

the political conflict of the post-communist countries

analysed. In a nutshell, economic protest emerges under

the conditions of a suppressed economic cleavage in the

field of party politics.

1

Theories of Post-communist Economic Contention

In the early 1990s, Central-Eastern Europe faced a double

challenge, namely, to transform both its politics and its

economy (further compounded by a state-building process

in Slovakia). While in the political arena democratic

institutions were expected to replace the undemocratic

ones, capitalism was to take over centrally planned

economies (see Offe 1996). At the same time, when

economic restructuring was expected to produce groups of

impoverished people, these people were given

opportunities to express their grievances in the newly

institutionalized democratic institutions. Seemingly, all

the conditions for a big political protest were in place:

the grievances produced by structural changes and the

opportunities provided by the opening up

(democratization) of political institutions (Snow and

Soule 2010; Tarrow 2011). Based on the logic of

mainstream social movement theories, an outburst of

protest was the expected outcome, but contrary to initial

fears it never occurred.

The strange absence of economic protest during the

first transition decade became one of the most prominent

theoretical puzzles in transitional political economy.

Why did Central-East Europeans not erupt in protest when

pressed by economic hardships? In a nutshell, three

answers were put forward in the literature: one institutional

(1), one grievance-based (2), and one policy-based (3). (1)

According to Ekiert and Kubik (1998, 2001), who focus on

2

Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and former GDR, limited access

to tripartite institutions and the fragmentation of the

labour movement chiefly account for the lack (except to

some extent in Poland) of economic protest in Central-

East European countries. According to these authors,

owing to its pre-1989 tradition of contentious politics

Poland was still the most contentious country in the

early 1990s (1989–1993). (2) Béla Greskovits (1998) finds

possible explanations in a host of structural

characteristics of post-communist countries, such as the

lack of extreme inequality (the source of relative

deprivation – and thus grievances), an established

protest culture (the source of protest repertoire), or

young people in urban areas ready to be mobilized (the

social bases of protest). He also cites the rise of

social expenditures, the core of the third explanation.

(3) Focusing on the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland,

Pieter Vanhuysse (2004, 2006) argues that the subdued

populations in these transforming countries were the

result of a ‘divide and pacify’ style of social policies,

which were designed to prevent any potential disruption

in these countries. While there were different paths

across the region, such as strategic retirement and pro-

employment labour market policies, they all resulted in

decreasing protest potential. Moreover, Vanhuysse

challenges Ekiert and Kubik’s picture of Poland as the

most contentious country, although his data also

3

demonstrate that it was more contentious than other post-

communist countries (Vanhuysse 2004: 428).

With the exception to some extent of Ekiert and

Kubik, who in terms of protest set Poland apart from the

other post-communist countries, these accounts focus on

explaining the situation of these countries as a group.

In other words, they compare the situation of post-

communist countries either to the original expectations

of a greater degree of transformation protest or to other

groups of countries, such as the Latin American region

(Greskovits 1998). Those who focus on the end of the

initially calm transformation period opt for the same

strategy and try to explain how the current economic

crisis brought an end to the previous quiet period in the

region as a whole.

Drawing on data from 18 East-European countries

after 2007 and on focused paired comparisons, Beissinger

and Sasse (2014) claim that the recession did indeed

bring about the political mobilization of East European

populations and that it was funnelled by socioeconomic

deprivation. They contend that while it is easier to

endure economic hardships for a first time and under the

conditions of optimistic expectations (such as in the

1990s), it is much more difficult to do so for a second

time and while simultaneously lacking prospects of a

bright future: ‘The stark contrast between the relatively

more “patient” or quiescent protest responses in Eastern

Europe during the transition to capitalism in the 1990s

4

and the more contentious protest responses to the Great

Recession (even though they both involved deep economic

pain) raises broader questions about the conditions under

which individuals mobilize collectively against economic

hardship. “Patience,” it seems, is much harder to sustain

the second time around.’ (ibid.: 365)

Comparing Western and Eastern European responses to

the crisis and focusing on the interplay of electoral and

protest politics, Kriesi (2014) first shows that in both

regions (with the exceptions of Poland and Slovakia and

in Eastern Europe together with the rates of economic

growth) budgetary deficits played a significant role in

explaining protest voting. Moreover, ‘in Central and

Eastern European countries in particular, the magnitude

of the economic crisis mattered mostly in combination

with preexisting homemade corruption and political

scandals’. (ibid: 328)

Going beyond a macro-regional comparison and drawing

on four case studies, Kriesi claims that extra-

institutional protest mobilization was universally

triggered by the adoption of austerity policies. Most

importantly, Kriesi shows that protest brings important

implications for elections, thus underscoring the

interplay between party and protest politics. In this

chapter, we draw on and further develop this interaction-

based explanation. We focus on four very similar countries

that however differed in terms of their protest

magnitude. We show that this difference can hardly be

5

explained by socioeconomic indicators, since they are not

associated with patterns of economic protest. The

explanation we intend to develop resides in the

differences in the general structure of political

conflict, and in particular we highlight the cleavage

structure and the configuration of party politics as key

to explaining cross-country differences in economic

protest.

Drawing on the more or less recently reinvigorated

interest in the interplay of protest and

institutionalized party-based politics (for example

Goldstone 2003; della Porta and Diani 2006; Kriesi at al.

2012; McAdam and Tarrow 2013; Hutter and Kriesi 2013;

della Porta 2015; Kriesi in this volume), we see them as

two fields of action that influence each other (Fligstein

and McAdam 2012: 91): ‘Typically the process is set in

motion by some exogenous change that is perceived by at

least two actors as posing a significant threat to, or

opportunity for, the realization of group interest.’ With

respect to economic interests, the field of party

politics has clearly played a more decisive role in the

post-communist democratizing context, with the field of

protest mostly reacting to developments in the political

party field.

Like the literature on radical right mobilization

(Giugni et al. 2005), and in contrast to the traditional

political opportunity structure-based arguments that see

strongly economically defined left parties as

6

instrumental to the mobilization of protest, we expect a

substitutive relation between the fields of party and

protest politics. Drawing on Piven and Cloward, Kriesi at

al. (2012: 190) label this the countervailing thesis,

which expects protest and party politics to move ‘in

opposite directions: the more contested and salient an

issue in the electoral area becomes, the less salient it

is expected to become in the protest politics arena’. An

economically mobilized field of protest can be expected

to form if political parties do not articulate

socioeconomic cleavages in the field of institutionalized

politics.

Theoretically, we draw here on the conceptualization

of inter-field relations put forward by Fligstein and

McAdam (2012) and Kriesi et al. (2012), and relate it to

the literature on transition (Offe 1996; Stark and Bruszt

1998; Greskovits 1998; Bohle and Greskovits 2012). As we

already noted, transition involved two major tasks,

democratization and marketization, the latter of which

constituted a source of major grievances that could be

articulated in the newly constituted democratic politics.

When political parties articulated these grievances in

the form of a socioeconomic cleavage, they crowded out

protest collective action and vice versa: in countries

where socioeconomic grievances were not articulated by

the parties, protest actors were given an opportunity to

constitute a field of contentious politics around this

issue.

7

Here we see the key difference between our two

groups of countries, which is that after the fall of

communism their main conflict lines developed in

different ways. While in the Czech Republic and Slovakia

the main conflict line was centred on socioeconomic

issues, in Hungary and Poland these issues never played

such a role. In short, while in the first two countries

socioeconomic issues formed the main cleavage in the

political party field, in the latter two other issues

assumed the main structuring role in the political

conflict. As a result, in the Czech Republic and Slovakia

these issues were articulated mostly by parties, while in

Poland and Hungary they were ‘left’ to the field of

protest politics to articulate. We would argue that the

‘suppressed’ articulation of socioeconomic issues in

party/electoral politics in Hungary and Poland helps

explain the higher levels of economic protest in these

countries.

Data and Methods

Our chapter is based on a protest event analysis. The

protest event is defined here as either an actual

gathering of at least three people convened in a public

space in order to make claims that bear on the interests

of an institution/collective actor, or a petition

addressed to an institution/collective actor (see Tilly

1995). Only real episodes of collective action are

included; threats of resorting to collective action, such

8

as strike alerts, were excluded. The dataset consists of

all events in which some socioeconomic issue was raised,

i.e. an issue related to monetary or fiscal policies,

taxes, wages, social policies, welfare issues etc. We

included events organized between January 1991 and

December 2010 in which a petition was not the only or

main protest strategy. The dataset comprises 754 events

in the Czech case, 852 in Slovakia, 4042 in Poland and

2624 events in Hungary. The unit of analysis is a year.

We used the electronic archives of the Czech News

Agency (ČTK), the News Agency of the Slovak Republic

(TASR), the Hungarian News Agency Corporation (MTI), and

the Polish Press Agency (PAP), and searched for selected

keywords in all electronically available news stories.

There is, however, a possibility of bias in the sources

we use stemming from general problems associated with

protest event analysis. First, the use of data from

nationwide press agencies may cause local events to be

underrepresented; second, violent and controversial

events may be overrepresented. On the other hand, the

agency’s electronic archives include information on all

the important events that have taken place in the

selected countries. The archives certainly represent the

single most important source of event data, because,

unlike various newspapers, they contain no explicit

political bias in favour of or against a particular type

of events or actors. For example, while strikes and

events related to the activities of trade unions tend to

9

be overrepresented in leftist newspapers, events of this

type are usually underrepresented in papers leaning to

the political right (Koopmans and Rucht 2002).

In order to measure protest, we used Tilly’s index

of protest magnitude (Tilly 1978: 95-97; Ekiert and Kubik

2001: 121) based on the multiplied attendance, duration,

and frequency of collective action for a particular

country in a given year. Therefore, the duration of the

protest and attendance at the event were recorded. When

the exact number of participants was not available

(several dozen, several hundred etc.), the lowest

estimate was coded (20, 200 etc.). We also used

additional data. The Net Replacement Rate for Average

Production Worker (specifically, single-earner family and

two-child model) representing the ratio of the net

unemployment insurance benefit to net income at the

average wage level was used as the indicator of the

generosity of social policies/the welfare state in the V4

countries (Van Vliet and Caminada 2012). This indicator

represents a key aspect of social policies in the

analysed countries (for a different measurement see Myant

and Drahokoupil 2010: 185-212) and, most importantly, the

data are available for the period and countries under

study, with the only exception of the last year (2010).

Drawing on Kriesi (2014), we combine two economic

indicators to measure economic hardships, i.e. economic

grievances in a particular country: the annual GDP growth

rate and the annual unemployment rate. We get our

10

‘grievance index’ by subtracting the unemployment rate

from GDP growth, which provides an annual measure of

economic grievances. The more negative the value of this

index is, the worse the economic conditions it

represents.

Dynamics of Economic Protest in V4 Countries

When standardized for population size, the most intensive

level of protest activities occurred in 1999 in Poland

(against the Buzek government’s reforms in agriculture

and healthcare) and in 2004 in Hungary (against the

reforms in the mining industry and healthcare). Czech and

Slovak economic protest did not even come close to this

level of protest magnitude (see Figure 1). Even if we

disregard these two main peaks of protest in Poland and

Hungary, the annual magnitude of protest is still much

higher in these two countries than it is in the Czech

Republic and Slovakia (see Figure 1), where the

distribution of protest remains much steadier over the

two decades under study, with three more significant

peaks of economic protest in the Czech Republic (public

services employees demanding higher wages in 1998, and

protests against public finance reforms in 2003 and

2008), and two in Slovakia (large pre-election campaigns

in 1994 and against economic reforms of Dzurinda´s

government in 1999).

Figure 1 ABOUT HERE

11

As regards the general protest dynamics in the V4

countries, i.e. how the overall dynamics of protest

compare, we may observe several interesting features (see

Figure 1). First, no significant wave of economic

contention is observed – in terms of within-country

development - in the early days of the economic

transformation in the Visegrad countries, which strongly

corresponds to the ‘patience thesis’ of post-communist

economic transition (see above and Greskovits 1998).

Second, there is only one period when protest in all

countries but one (Hungary) escalated simultaneously,

namely, in the period of 1997-2000. In all three

countries, this is usually attributed to the growing

dissatisfaction with the reform/austerity policies that

were introduced during times of economic difficulty.

Klaus’s (austerity) ‘packages’ in the Czech Republic,

Buzek’s ‘four reforms programme' in Poland, and

Dzurinda’s restrictive measures in Slovakia were a

reaction to an economic slowdown at the end of the first

transformation decade, and in the Czech Republic and

Poland coincided with public dissatisfaction with

politics and the political elite (Stanley 2013,

Mansfeldová 2013). In the Czech Republic this wave

resulted for the first time in the victory of a leftist

party – the Social Democrats – in the national elections

(1998); in Poland one-fifth of the parliamentary mandates

in the 2001 elections was acquired by populist radicals

12

from Self-Defence and Catholic nationalists from the

League of the Polish Families, while the left won the

elections (see Stanley 2013: 180). At the same time, if

we look at the composition of all the protest issues in

this protest wave (not reported here), we see that

socioeconomic issues dominated in Poland, while in the

Czech Republic and Slovakia the portfolio of issues was

much more diverse, which is in line with the general

argument of this chapter (on the diversity of claims in

the Czech Republic in the late 1990s, see also Císař

2013).

Third, the next wave of protest in the V4 countries

can be identified in 2003 and 2004 (in the Czech

Republic, Hungary, and to some extent in Slovakia), which

involved protests against further rounds of economic

reforms and austerity policies. Except for the Czech

Republic in 2008, this protest wave was not repeated

later in the second post-communist decade. The 2008

protest in the Czech Republic was a response to the

public finance reform pushed through by the liberal-right

Topolánek government.

The Dynamics of Protest and Economic Hardships in the V4

Countries

In all four countries major economic reforms started

after the collapse of the old regimes in 1989, although

in two of them – Hungary and Poland – some noticeable

changes had already taken place before 1989. Compared to

13

Hungary’s and Poland’s significant economic changes, only

mild deregulation of economic activities took place

before 1989 in Czechoslovakia.

Czech Republic

In Czechoslovakia, the main economic reforms – namely

privatization, liberalization, restitution, industrial

restructuration, and macroeconomic stabilization – were

adopted in the early 1990s under Prime Minister Václav

Klaus. Klaus combined ideological support for the free

market with active welfare policies; consequently, the

resultant model ‘combined “social-democratic”

entitlements (pensions, family protection) and liberal

incentives for the middle class (voluntary private

pensions and tax breaks)’ (Inglot 2009: 77). Overall,

there was a relatively straightforward reduction in

welfare benefits up to 1996, when the Czech government

started to compensate the ‘losers’ of the transformation

(Greskovits 1998: 137; see Figure 2). This strategy was

finished by the interim government in 1998, and since

then social policies (as indicated by the unemployment

replacement rate, see Figure 2) have remained relatively

stable. In the Czech case, the liberalization strategy

applied sought to build a market from scratch, whereby

97% of state ownership of enterprises in 1989 was

transformed into 80% private ownership of enterprises by

1998 (Shafik 1995; Claessens and Djankov 2002). The Czech

currency became fully convertible in 1995; and in

14

contrast to other post-communist countries and owing to

macroeconomic stabilization policies the inflation rate

did not go through any major fluctuations. However, after

the initial economic expansion of the mid-1990s the first

recession came in 1996 and 1997, while the recovery (in

terms of both GDP and the unemployment rate) was very

slow and lasted basically until 2006, when the liberal-

conservative coalition came to power after eight years of

social-democratic governments. It started to push

neoliberal economic reforms, which came into effect in

2008. The measures consisted of lowering business and

capital taxes and social benefits, raising consumption

taxes, and introducing fees in the healthcare system

(Myant et al. 2013).

While there were twists and turns in the Czech

Republic’s economic development, they seem to have been

related to economic protest only to a certain extent. The

same applies to social benefits. Looking at Figure 2, in

the Czech case the dynamic of protest seemed to follow

the evolution of grievances in the beginning of the

studied period. This applies mostly to the first two

years of the economic transition of the country.

Increasing grievances since the end of the 1990s might

have provided conditions for protest, but they alone are

unable to account for the three waves of protest observed

(1998, 2000, 2003). Rather, the general political

dynamics of the country and its (austerity) policies

provide some clues here.

15

Figure 2 ABOUT HERE

The first peak may be attributed to the 1998

election campaign, since the large strikes were supposed

to provide support for left parties in the elections; the

second one consists of internationalized alter-

globalization protests in Prague, related to the

September meeting of the International Monetary Fund

(IMF) and the World Bank in the city and to a miners’

strike; and the third one was formed by protest events

against welfare cuts planned by the social-democratic

government of Vladimír Špidla. Not surprisingly, the

initial efforts of Topolánek´s right government (2006-

2009) to implement large-scale austerity measures without

any significant effort to include social partners (mostly

trade unions) into the negotiations met with serious

opposition. The protests were organized not only by trade

unions and supported by political opposition, but also by

students and universities; a large coalition of civil

society organizations also joined in and co-organized the

protests (see Myant et al. 2013: 397). Given the general

economic situation, which was far from critical, it was

the way the austerity measures were politically designed

and promoted and their lack of legitimacy in the eyes of

the public that most fuelled the protest. The data

clearly suggest that the protest intensified before the

actual impact of the economic crisis on the national

16

economy and as a reaction to the government’s insistence

on pursuing neoliberal reforms without any apparent

consideration of their potential social costs.

Slovakia

While Slovakia shared the economic destiny of the Czech

lands until 1993, its economic development after the

divorce was somewhat different. Compared to its Czech

counterpart, the Slovak level of privatization was much

slower, with about 40% of its domestic GDP produced by

the private sector in 1994 compared to 70-80% in the

Czech Republic (Greskovits 1998: 22). Slovakia’s economic

structure was imbalanced – a legacy of the former

economic partnership among communist countries – towards

heavy industry to an even greater degree than that of the

Czech part of former Czechoslovakia, and the process of

economic transition was slower and more dramatic than in

other countries. The process of post-transition economic

decline in Slovakia began a year after that in the Czech

Republic (1997) and was more lasting and steeper than in

any other V4 country (Inglot 2009; see Figure 2). The

process of economic downfall continued also after Mečiar

´s authoritarian government lost power in 1998, with the

steepest decline occurring in 2000. The country went

through a slow recovery from then until 2007. Economic

reforms were introduced by the second Dzurinda government

(2002-2006) and were aimed at lowering direct tax rates,

introducing pro-market legislation, and attracting

17

foreign investors. As far as social policies are

concerned, the decrease in social benefits (as indicated

by the unemployment replacement rate) was implemented in

a milder manner than in the Czech Republic (for a

different view based on total expenditure on social

protection, see Myant and Drahokoupil 2010: 201). Social

benefits were increased in 1999 (by the large left-right

anti-Mečiar coalition) and then in 2004 (by the second

Dzurinda government).

In Slovakia the relation between economic

conditions, social benefits and protest works in a

fashion very similar to the Czech Republic. Economic

hardships seem to be what create the conditions for

economic protest, and this was most notably the case in

the early 1990s and between 1996 and 2007; however, they

alone are unable to account for particular waves of

economic contention. Like in the Czech case, overall

political dynamics and public policies provide us with a

deeper insight.

The first peak of economic protest was wholly formed

by the parliamentary election campaign (1994) in which

political parties raised economic issues (with the key

party being Mečiar´s Movement for a Democratic Slovakia).

The second wave (1999) was dominated by trade union

demonstrations and events organized by the political

opposition in response to the implementation of two

reform packages by Dzurinda’s first cabinet without

consulting on them with the major trade union federation.

18

Consequently, the trade unions declared their demands

from the government, e.g. lower taxes, wage increases,

and pro-employment policies. When the government again

ignored these demands, large demonstrations ensued. As

Figure 2 clearly shows, the onset of the recent financial

crisis – even though it hit the country relatively hard –

was not marked by any significant increase in protest

activity because the trade unions were included in the

processes of consultation regarding economic policies

(see below).

Poland

Despite the proclaimed ‘shock therapy’ (the so-called

Balcerowicz plan, named after deputy prime minister and

minister of finance Leszek Balcerowicz) the pace of

economic changes in Poland was somewhat slower than in

the Czech Republic, but faster, on the other hand, than

in Slovakia. With respect to economic liberalization, the

level was about the same, while with respect to

privatization, the percentage of GDP produced by the

private sector in 1994 was about 55% (higher than in

Slovakia and lower than in the Czech Republic)

(Greskovits 1998: 22). The economic consequences of the

transition from a centrally planned economy were positive

in terms of economic growth but also brought negative

effects for some parts of the population (especially

people employed in agriculture and the mining industry)

that were partially compensated by protective social

19

policy measures introduced by minister of labour and

social policy in the Suchocka government (1992-1993)

Jacek Kuron (Ekiert and Kubik 2001: 149; Golinowska

2009). The country’s initial economic expansion (in terms

of the unemployment rate and GDP growth) weakened after

1998, when the country was driven into economic problems

by dynamics similar to those in Slovakia; after 2002 the

country started to recover and in 2007 it enjoyed rising

GDP and a declining unemployment rate (Golinowska 2005;

Myant et al. 2013; see Figure 2). There were no

significant downturns or upturns in the evolution of the

state’s strategies towards the ‘losers’ of the

transition: social benefits (as indicated by the

unemployment replacement rate) decreased, but did so in a

relatively smooth and gradual manner.

In Poland, the evolution of economic conditions,

welfare policies and economic protest seem to be related

even less than in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (see

Figure 2). The only period that is consistent with the

assumption of the prominent role played by economic

grievances is at the end of the 1990s, when economic

problems and growing dissatisfaction with the reform

politics of Buzek’s government translated into a wider

backlash that ultimately resulted in a radicalization of

the parliamentary representation (see Figure 2 and

Stanley 2013: 178-179). However, like in the other cases

mentioned above, economic contention seems to reflect not

only socioeconomic developments, but also the way they

20

were dealt with in the form of particular public policies

and more general trends in Polish politics.

There are two major protest peaks: the first one in

1993 was formed by a series of transformation-related

protest campaigns. First, there were the protests against

the Suchocka cabinet’s reforms, such as the generally

contentious process of negotiating the ‘Pact on State

Enterprises’, i.e. the legislative package that created

the tripartite commission and provided the legal

framework for collective bargaining at the national level

and that was originally presented to parliament by

Suchocka’s minister Jacek Kuron (only approved in

February 1994 by the subsequent government formed by ex-

communists; for a detailed overview see Ekiert and Kubik

2001: 148-157). These protests ultimately contributed to

the government’s demise later the same year. Second,

there was the political campaign of Solidarity, which

related first to the election campaign and second and

later on to the fact that ex-communists had won the

elections and entered the government. However, the most

impressive protest wave took place in 1999, and consisted

mostly of protests from physicians, nurses and midwives

against their low pay and deteriorating working

conditions. Another important component in this protest

wave was the farmers’ protests, sparked by the direct

action strategies of the agrarian populist Self-Defence

Party, which entered parliament in 2001 (see Stanley

2013: 180). Protest further fluctuated in the coming

21

years; however, the global Great Recession did not result

in any significant protest activities.

Hungary

The Hungarian case was different from the other V4

countries. Despite the initial high level of

privatization and liberalization and private sector

growth similar to the other V4 countries, the first

economic downturn began earlier (1995), leading to the

introduction of ‘the most severe austerity program thus

far in the country’s postsocialist history’ (Bohle and

Greskovits 2012: 149). Hungary’s substantial foreign debt

and the presence of the IMF played an important role in

the introduction of the so-called Bokros package – named

after its author, minister of finance Lajos Bokros – by

Horn’s socialist government. This programme included

various social benefit cutbacks, a rise in the retirement

age etc. Overall, the transition process was seen as

unproblematic and was positively rated by investors and

international financial institutions (Orenstein 2008).

The policies of stimulating domestic demand subsequently

helped to achieve economic growth and a decreasing

unemployment rate, which continued until 2006. In 2006

Gyurcsány´s socialist government was re-elected while

promising economic ‘reform without austerity measures’ in

order to reduce the budget deficit (Korkut 2010; Myant et

al. 2013). However, the package that was introduced

consisted of a series of cutbacks in the welfare system

22

and led to the subsequent slowdown of the economy in

2007, paving the way to a severe recession.

Like in the other cases, in Hungary general

political developments and particular policies seem to

coincide with economic protest. Looking at Figure 2,

although the periods 1991-1997 and 2006-2008 in

particular suggest economic grievances played a prominent

role, it was through particular political steps and their

resultant policies that they were translated into

protest.

The first significant protest wave occurred as early

as 1991 and was largely related to the conservative

government’s preparation of the new Labour Code, which

specified among others the role of trade unions in

collective bargaining. The second protest peak was in

2004 and involved protests organized nationwide mostly by

farming associations and trade unions representing

agricultural workers who were mainly demanding increased

government funding and subsidies prior to the country's

EU accession (1st May 2004). Although there was a lot of

well-recorded anti-government protest activity after the

fall 2006 leak of Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány’s

secret party meeting speech earlier that year, leading to

the demise of the centre-left and a strengthening of

right-wing radicals (see Kurkut 2010; Tóka and Popa 2013:

311-312; Kriesi 2014: 359-360), the onset of the Great

Recession in Hungary in 2009 does not stand out in our

data on the magnitude of economic protest (for a more

23

detailed discussion, see the section on the Great

Recession below).

Economic Protest across V4 Countries

As demonstrated in the sections above, the socioeconomic

transition of the Visegrad countries after the fall of

socialism has many important similarities when looking at

their development in time (see, for example, also Inglot

2009). How similar are they when compared across them?

According to Bohle and Greskovits (2012: 140-141),

although there were three major differences between these

countries at the beginning of the transition, namely,

while in Poland and Hungary economic liberalization

started well before 1989, and they both became heavily

externally indebted, but stable in terms of their

statehood, Czechoslovakia kept its rigid centrally

planned system until 1989, was not indebted and in 1993

split into two parts, the Czech and Slovak republics, but

at the end of the day, they formed a single regime of

political economy. This so-called embedded neoliberalism

has been based on relatively generous welfare programmes

and generally ‘the search for compromises between market

transformation and social cohesion’ (ibid: 22).

Still, using our socioeconomic indicators, there are

differences between the countries (see Table 1). Likewise

they are different, probably surprisingly, in terms of

their economic protest magnitude. Hence, can

24

socioeconomic variables help explain different protest

levels across the countries?

If compared in terms of their average protest

magnitude, the four countries split into two groups: one

less contentious and one more contentious. While the

Czech Republic and Slovakia display low levels of protest

(the average values of the Tilly’s index are 19 and 20

respectively, standardized for the population size),

Hungary and Poland are comparatively much more

contentious (1009 and 710 respectively, standardized for

the population size). Here we focus on a possible

explanation for this remarkable difference between the

two groups of countries (see Table 1).

Looking at grievances across the countries, the

indicator displays its highest value in the case of

Slovakia, followed by Poland. However, Slovakia does not

belong to the pair of contentious countries. Similarly,

looking at our indicator of social benefits, it shows

almost the same values for the Czech Republic and

Hungary, which, however, behave very differently in terms

of economic protest, the Czech Republic being the least

and Hungary the most contentious country among our cases.

Reflecting on the problems with extant accounts of

economic contention, in the theory part of the chapter we

hypothesized the overall structure of political conflict

to explain the observed difference. While in the Czech

Republic and Slovakia a socioeconomic cleavage forms one

of the main conflict lines in the party politics field,

25

in the other two countries this cleavage is either not

among the most important lines (Poland), or has basically

never existed as a structuring principle of party

politics (Hungary).

Table 1 ABOUT HERE

In the Czech Republic, a socioeconomic cleavage was

constituted as the main conflict line in the new

democratic field of party politics soon after 1989 (see

Mansfeldová 2013: 221) and it has remained so since then

(Kopecký 2007: 120). Accordingly, economic interests have

mainly been articulated in the field of institutionalized

politics in the Czech Republic, which has had the effect

of depressing the average magnitude of economic protest

in the field of contentious politics. Although the Czech

Republic was established in 1993 as one of the successor

states of former Czechoslovakia, an open nationalist

mobilization never played a significant role in the

country, and all potentially nationalist claims withered

away with the partition of the former Czechoslovak

federation (Mansfeldová 2013: 234-236).

Compared to its Czech counterpart, nationalist

claims acquired stronger salience in Slovakia in the

early 1990s, ultimately resulting in the ‘Velvet divorce’

of 1993. In this respect, the nationalist cleavage

structured the Slovak party political field in a much

more pronounced way; on the other hand, even the

26

nationalism of the early 1990s had its economic side,

since it was partly framed in terms of the economic

hardships unequally distributed between the two parts of

the federation. Owing to the location of heavy industry

in Slovakia, it was hit by the transformation’s policies

more heavily than the Czech part. Still, due to the

belated nation building process and the presence of the

Hungarian minority in Southern Slovakia, nationalism

continued to play a structuring role in Slovak party

politics even after the establishment of the independent

state (Kopecký 2007: 122-124). The economic cleavage

constituted itself as the main conflict line only at the

beginning of the second post-communist decade, after the

semi-authoritarian experiment of Prime Minister Mečiar

came to a close at the end of the 1990s. After the issues

of stateness and foreign policy orientation of the new

country had been resolved, the conflict over economic

issues started to significantly shape the field of

political parties’ articulation, ‘without abandoning the

national appeals altogether’ (Deegan-Krause 2013: 276).

Although there was a seeming twist ‘back’ to nationalism

at the end of the second decade, it could not equal the

salience of its 1990s predecessor, and remained more

symbolic in nature (ibid: 272-273).

While the economic cleavage played an important role

in structuring party politics in both the Czech and,

later on, Slovak republics, in Poland it became

‘embedded’ in a much more complicated conflict pattern.

27

This pattern was based more on diverging interpretations

of basic religious and civilizational values, including

not only the conflict between secular and confessional

views but also contrasting perspectives on the Polish

communist past, than on different models of political

economy: ‘in the language of Polish politics this

ideological cleavage, not the socio-economic one, is

defined as the left-right dimension’ (Jasiewicz 2007:

88). In the first decade, the ‘regime divide’ (communism

vs. anticommunism) was the most visibly articulated

division, to be replaced in salience by the conflict over

the politics of post-communist transition itself in the

second decade (Stanley 2013: 168). For the Polish

conservative right of the second decade, the left and

liberals of the first transition period presented not

only a diverging model of socioeconomic development, but

also a serious civilizational threat to the very

existence of the Polish nation and its core values. As a

result, these forces, especially from the Law and Justice

Party and the League of Polish Families, prioritized

‘“moral revolution” and the “politics of history”’ at the

expense of economic issues (ibid: 185).

A similar picture is found in the field of Hungarian

party politics, where economic issues never attained the

degree of salience comparable to what they had in the

Czech Republic and Slovakia. Tóka and Popa (2013: 318)

aptly sum up: ‘economic policy issues and social class

played a minor role in party competition… non-economic

28

issues defined party positions, inter-party distances and

electoral behavior’. They add that for the period up

until 2010, socioeconomic issues have not displayed ‘any

truly consistent relationship with the policy positions

of the parties’ (ibid.). Instead of the economic

cleavage, a socio-cultural division between the

Christian-national, anti-communist and agrarian camp, on

one hand, and secular, cosmopolitan, and urban parties,

on the other, has consistently structured the Hungarian

field of party politics (see ibid: 302), creating a space

for the articulation of economic interests in the field

of contentious politics. Hungary thus represents the

exact opposite of the Czech Republic, where

institutionalized actors in the field of party politics

crowded potential protest actors out of the articulation

space in the field of contention.

Implications for the Great Recession

The spillover of the banking crisis in the United States

and the subsequent economic crisis in 2008 hit the V4

countries in different ways, partially because of their

different economic background, structures of their

economies and the actual state of their economic

development. The steepest economic decline in terms of

GDP growth was experienced in Slovakia (by nearly 11%),

closely followed by the Czech and Hungarian economies

(nearly 8%). By contrast, the Polish economy suffered

much less, experiencing a decline of 3.5%. Extending our

29

argument to the Great Recession, we should not expect

higher levels of protest to be found in Slovakia and the

Czech Republic, since, even though they were hit by the

crisis, economic demands would find their way into

politics via institutionalized means. We should also find

no response in Poland, which was affected comparatively

mildly. Only Hungary was hit comparatively substantially

and due to the structure of its political field this

allowed for a big protest wave.

The responses of the governments to the crisis

differed: the Czech (Topolánek´s) government clearly

followed a neoliberal strategy and used the notion of

crisis to legitimize further liberalization and fiscal

cuts in economic, healthcare and social policies, while

the budget deficit and state debt appeared to be the

government’s only concern (Draxler 2014). The Slovak

(Fico´s) government reacted to the crisis in a Keynesian

manner: it increased state spending (public sector wages,

social spending and investment), while limiting the

impact of the austerity package (which mostly applied to

the financial sector, business policy and the labour

market). Also, in contrast to the Czech case, these steps

were systematically consulted within the tripartite

structure and particular interest groups were invited to

approve anti-crisis measures (Myant et al. 2013: 399).

Despite its clear right-wing orientation, the Polish

(Tusk´s) government took a more pragmatic stance and like

Slovakia took into account the potential social costs of

30

the austerity measures and invited different

representatives of social interests to participate in the

discussion of anti-crisis policies. These included mostly

an increase in public-sector wages, employment

legislation amendments, a tax reduction for businesses,

and an increase in the co-financing of EU-funded

developmental projects (ibid: 398). The position of the

Hungarian socialist (Gyurcsány´s and Bajnai´s) government

in 2008 and 2009 was different from Poland in terms of

the external pressures it had to deal with: owing to the

external financing and vulnerability of its key financial

institutions the crisis was already affecting the country

in 2008. The government had to approach the IMF and the

EU and negotiate a rescue package that was granted under

strict fiscal conditions. These were met mostly by

introducing cuts in the number of public-sector employees

and cuts to pensions and welfare benefits. The austerity

policies were formally consulted with business

associations, economists and trade unions, but the latter

de facto could not exert any influence on the outcomes of

the negotiation (ibid).

As expected, there was no increase in protest in the

Czech Republic, Slovakia, or Poland. Yet, there was no

increase in economic contention visible in our data in

the Hungarian case either, which seems to contradict our

main argument (see Figure 2 and above). However, this

probably has more to do with the way economic contention

is defined and coded in our chapter than with the actual

31

lack of contention (cf. Kriesi 2014: 359-360). Since in

Hungary recession-related grievances were also framed as

issues of government, its functioning and corruption,

they are not reflected in the data presented here. If we

look at these types of governance/state-related issues

(not reported here), there indeed was an increase in the

last five years in Hungary, with the peak occurring in

2006-2007.

Conclusions

In this chapter we focused on economic contention in four

very similar post-communist countries, which differ,

however, in terms of the magnitude of their economic

protest. After mapping the existing debate on this

subject, we looked at the dynamics of protest. Supporting

Kriesi’s (2014) results, our case studies demonstrate

that economic grievances, rather than being directly

reflected in collective action, are translated into such

action (indirectly) through austerity policies that

address perceived (or deliberately framed) economic

problems. Moreover, as the Czech case illustrates,

austerity policies may produce collective mobilization

even without corresponding problems in the economy.

Further, we looked at the varying levels of economic

contention across the countries, identifying problems

with current explanations for this. Therefore, we

proposed explaining the differences in economic protest

across the countries by the differences in the structure

32

of their political fields. While in the Czech Republic

and Slovakia economic issues found their way into

politics mainly through the field of political parties,

in Hungary and Poland these issues did not structure the

party politics field and were instead articulated in the

field of contentious politics. As discussed in the

previous section, the same argument seems to fit the

current period of austerity.

Regarding economic issues, our chapter demonstrated

the existence of a substitutive/countervailing relation

between the party politics field and contentious

collective action in the studied countries. As a result,

the chapter potentially represents a challenge to a

fairly generally accepted prediction of the political

opportunity structure-based theories, which in this area

expect that the presence of (socioeconomically defined)

left-wing political parties fosters economic contention.

By showing that the articulation of a socioeconomic

cleavage in the party politics field suppresses economic

contention, our chapter intends to contribute to the

current broader debates on the interaction between social

fields in general and party and contentious politics

fields in particular.

The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the CzechScience Foundation (grants ‘Collective Action and Protestin East-Central Europe’, code GAP404/11/0462, and‘Protestors in Context: An Integrated and ComparativeAnalysis of Democratic Citizenship in the Czech

33

Republic’, code GA13-29032S). This work was alsosupported by the project ‘Employment of Newly GraduatedDoctors of Science for Scientific Excellence’(CZ.1.07/2.3.00/30.0009), co-financed by the EuropeanSocial Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic.We are especially thankful to Kateřina Vráblíková, SwenHutter, Jan Drahokoupil and this volume’s editors fortheir helpful comments on earlier drafts of the chapter.All potential problems and omissions are our own.

34

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Tables

Table 1: Main Indicators across the Countries

Economicprotest magnitude

Grievances

Social benefits

Articulated economiccleavage

Czech R.

19 - 4,14 53,8 + +

Slovakia

20 - 10,44 61,4 +

Poland 710 - 9,84 31,8 -Hungary 1009 - 7,1 48 - -Note: Annual averages (except for the last column)

40

Figures

Figure 1: Economic Protest in the V4 countries (Tilly Index, 1991-2010, standardized for the population size)

Figure 2: Economic grievances, social benefits and economic protest

41

42