Young Greeks’ Social Representation of Protest: Dialogical Structure and Ideological Function

Public protest has been a controversial form of political participation which aims to intervene in the socio-political status quo by promoting or preventing social change. The political and social life in Greece has been greatly influenced by public protests which, in several cases, acted as regulators and drivers of change. The main interest of this study is to examine public protest as an object of social representation of young Greeks in the current socio-political and historical context. Obtaining data from focus groups, we use recent dialogical approaches to Social Representation Theory to examine the content, the emerging identities, as well as the structure and the ideological function of protest representation amongst young Greeks. Our findings indicate that protests' representation is conceptualized on the basis of dialectical antitheses and contradictory identities; the idealistic perception of public protest is based on the conceptualization of the identity of active citizen and purposeful protesters, while the violent side of protests emerges from the identity of rioters and protest armies. We argue that these main elements of protest representation also determine its internal structure. In addition, they have an implicit ideological function as they express the way in which young Greeks discuss, negotiate, assimilate and redefine public protest under their set of beliefs and their worldview concerning social reality. Keywords: protest, ideology, social representations