Voicing outrage unevenly : democratic dissatisfaction, non-participation and frequencies of participation in the 15M campaign

Abstract

This paper explores frequencies of participation and non-participation in the 15M protest campaign in Spain. Given the nature of this movement, we focus on democratic dissatisfaction. Our findings suggest that, relative to nonparticipants, democratic dissatisfaction is significantly associated with multipletime participation, but not with one-time participation. In other words, those who participated only once are not substantially more dissatisfied than those who did not participate. This is relevant, since while the “indignados” label and the slogan “Real Democracy Now!” suggest democratic discontent to be a central factor uniting 15M challengers, we show that not all those who participated were in fact “indignados” when compared to non-participants. Relying on a general survey with questions on different frequencies of participation in the 15M, we simultaneously avoid treating participants as a homogenous group and include non-participants.