Doctoral Dissertation Research: Extra-Institutional Politics and the Construction of Europe: The Europeanization of Agricultural Politics

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This doctoral dissertation research investigates agrarian protest in France from 1980 to 1995. During this period, agrarian collective action was chronic and ubiquitous, frequently crossing national borders. For example, demonstrations in Brussels and Geneva included French farmers, and protests in Strasbourg against the Common Agricultural Policy Reforms included farmers from France, Germany, and Switzerland. Protest and network data will be collected in selected French localities to answer the following questions. (1) What are the sources of agrarian protest? (2) What effect does agrarian contention have on institutionalized agricultural politics? (3) Does this recent pattern of farmers' mobilization reflect the Europeanization of the agricultural conflict system? The research will test the hypothesis that expanding political opportunities in the 1980s enabled dissident farmers to broaden their constituency and to establish new interorganizational links. As a result, farmers forged a common front against the neocorporatist agreements that previously dictated agricultural policy. This project contributes to the research on multi-level governance in the European Union and the transnationalization of contention by exploring relations between the "national" and the "local" political arenas of agricultural politics, and by examining the concrete organizational foundations of "multilevel governance."