Protest types and protester profiles: testing meso−micro-associations between event characteristics and participant attitudes

Can we infer individual characteristics of protest participants by examining the demonstrations they go to? Public debate and academic literature both tend to make such inferences from the meso- to the micro-level. This article tests whether this practice is empirically warranted. We first identify the expectations on individual protester characteristics in three prominent classifications of protest events: collective vs. connective, instrumental vs. expressive, and particularistic vs universalistic protests. We then use event-level information to classify eight major protest events, held in Germany between 2003 and 2020, on these three dimensions. Building on a unique sample of protesters at these events (N = 4310), we test whether these protest types are linked to individual-level differences in (1) participants’ involvement in social movement organizations, (2) their external efficacy, and (3) their degree of trust in political institutions and satisfaction with democracy. We find support for meso–micro-associations in all three dimensions. However, we also find that meso–micro-links are generally stronger for an issue-based classification into progressive and non-progressive events. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, among the three dimensions, only the collective-connective one can reliably be operationalized on the meso- and on the micro-level. The article contributes to the literature on the diversity of protest crowds, introduces empirical nuance to the practice of binary categorization of protest events, and challenges the explanatory performance of abstract versus more concrete, issue-based event classifications.