Book
2024
Felipe G. Santos
Palgrave Macmillan, London
This book offers an original analysis of how Spain's Platform of People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) built one of the most effective social movements of the 21st century. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and original surveys, it argues that care — in the forms of empathy, solidarity, and collective empowerment — was not a byproduct of activism but a deliberate political strategy. The book develops a theory of the 'politics of care' in social movement contexts and traces how the PAH transformed passive beneficiaries into active political agents.
Why it matters: Reframes how we understand social movement success: not as a function of resources or opportunities alone, but of the emotional and relational infrastructure movements build among their members.
Book
2022
Felipe G. Santos, Gabriele D'adda, Montserrat Emperador Badimon, Ezequiel Ramón Pinat, Eduard Sala Barceló, and Luis Sanmartín Cava (eds.)
Bellaterra Editorial, Manresa
An edited volume marking ten years of the PAH, Spain's landmark housing rights movement. Contributions from academics, activists, and legal scholars document the movement's strategies for blocking evictions, its legislative campaigns, its organisational model, and its political legacy. The volume combines academic analysis with first-person testimonies from activists and affected families.
Why it matters: The definitive scholarly and activist record of a movement that stopped over 27,000 evictions and inspired housing movements across Europe and Latin America.
Journal Article
2026
Felipe G. Santos, Mathias Hoffmann, and Dan Mercea
Party Politics
This article examines the relationship between individual protest participation and how that participation shapes evaluations of political parties that endorse street politics. Using survey data from five European countries, we show that protesters do not simply evaluate parties that validate their actions more positively — the relationship is conditional on ideological alignment, party credibility, and the type of protest involved. The findings challenge simple accounts of movement-party linkages.
Why it matters: Reveals that the bridge between street movements and electoral politics is more complex — and more fragile — than political observers assume.
Journal Article
2025
Felipe G. Santos and Bálint Mikola
Democratization
How do opposition parties respond to democratic backsliding? This article analyses the United for Hungary coalition's strategy in the 2022 elections — the most significant attempt to unseat Viktor Orbán since his 2010 election victory. We examine how a heterogeneous opposition coalition formed, ran joint primaries, and ultimately failed, drawing lessons for opposition strategies under competitive authoritarianism.
Why it matters: One of the first systematic analyses of opposition coalition-building under backsliding conditions — with direct lessons for democracies under pressure across Europe.
Journal Article
2025
Felipe G. Santos, Mathias Hoffmann, and Dan Mercea
International Journal of Sociology
This article conceptualises the protest field as a relational space structured by brokerage — the capacity of specific individuals and organisations to connect otherwise disconnected protest networks. Drawing on network analysis of protest participation data, we identify the structural positions of brokers within and across contentious episodes and examine the social and biographical characteristics of those who occupy them.
Why it matters: Introduces a network perspective to explain why some activists become hubs of mobilization — a key mechanism in understanding how protests scale up or die out.
Journal Article
2024
Felipe G. Santos and Dan Mercea
Perspectives on Politics
What drives electoral support for movement parties — their policy positions or their protest activities? Using conjoint and vignette survey experiments across five European countries, this article shows that voters primarily respond to policy content, not protest tactics. Party credibility as a governing actor matters more than whether it endorses street politics. These findings reframe debates about the electoral appeal of movement parties and challenge assumptions that protest activities function as electoral signals.
Why it matters: Settles a longstanding debate in the literature by showing, with experimental evidence, that voters care more about what movement parties stand for than how they protest.
Journal Article
2024
Felipe G. Santos, Mathias Hoffmann, and Dan Mercea
Journal of European Public Policy
Who protests online, who protests in person, and who pivots between both? This article analyses the individual characteristics and structural barriers that shape protest style — distinguishing between in-person-only, online-only, and hybrid (pivoting) protesters. Using survey data from post-pandemic Europe, we find that digital protest is not simply a substitute for in-person mobilisation but a distinct and complementary form of political action with different social bases.
Why it matters: Shows that online protest has its own social logic — it is not just a fallback for those who cannot attend in person — with major implications for understanding political inequality in participation.
Journal Article
2024
Felipe G. Santos, Dan Mercea, and Mathias Hoffmann
Political Studies
Existing research on protest participation treats non-participants as a uniform category. This article disaggregates non-participation into 'potential participants' — those who would protest under the right conditions — and genuine non-participants. Using latent class analysis of large-scale survey data, we show that this distinction has major consequences for understanding political inequality, the limits of mobilisation, and the conditions under which protest can expand.
Why it matters: Reveals a large, previously invisible population of latent protesters — people who could be mobilised but haven't been — with significant implications for social movement strategy.
Journal Article
2024
Felipe G. Santos
Social Movement Studies
Spain's far-right party Vox has constructed an ecosystem of nominally independent civil society organizations to simulate grassroots support, advance culture-war agendas, and occupy spaces traditionally held by progressive actors. This article analyses the organisational strategies, funding networks, and discursive repertoires of these top-down organizations, showing how they mimic the forms of civil society while serving partisan political goals — a strategy the article terms 'astroturf counter-mobilisation'.
Why it matters: Documents a new right-wing playbook for undermining civil society from within — a strategy now being replicated across Europe and beyond.
Journal Article
2024
Felipe G. Santos, Dan Mercea, and Michael Saker
Social Movement Studies
Using a novel geo-indexing methodology applied to Facebook data, this article maps the spatial and temporal spread of anti-lockdown mobilisation in the UK. It identifies the geographic clusters, organisational networks, and framing strategies of groups opposing Covid-19 restrictions, and analyses how a diffuse, online-first movement translated — or failed to translate — into physical protest.
Why it matters: Develops a replicable digital-methods toolkit for tracking online social movements — applicable well beyond the Covid context.
Journal Article
2024
Felipe G. Santos and Dan Mercea
Acta Politica
Who supports movement parties? This article develops a typology of movement party supporters — distinguishing between ideologically aligned young democrats, critical citizens sceptical of all parties, and protest voters using movement parties as an expressive outlet. Using cluster analysis of survey data, we show that these profiles have distinct implications for party stability, voter loyalty, and democratic quality.
Why it matters: Explains why movement party electoral support is often volatile — the coalition of supporters is internally fragmented and driven by very different motivations.
Journal Article
2024
Felipe G. Santos
European Societies
This article analyses how the PAH transformed people facing eviction — initially passive beneficiaries of the movement's legal assistance — into politically active agents. Through a longitudinal analysis of activist trajectories, it identifies the mechanisms through which participation in movement activities generates political efficacy, social solidarity, and sustained commitment to collective action.
Why it matters: Provides micro-level evidence of how social movements generate political capacity among the most marginalized — a key contribution to theories of participation and empowerment.
Journal Article
2023
Felipe G. Santos and Gomer Betancor
Revista Española de Sociología
A bibliometric and thematic analysis of the field of social movement studies in Spain from 1980 to 2020. The article maps the intellectual evolution of the field, identifying its key paradigms, dominant objects of study, institutional centres, and scholars — and documenting the field's increasing dialogue with international social movement theory.
Why it matters: The first comprehensive map of social movement scholarship in Spain — an essential reference for scholars working in or on the Iberian context.
Journal Article
2022
Felipe G. Santos, Matthias Hoffmann, Christina Neumayer, and Dan Mercea
Communication Methods and Measures
Big data news repositories are increasingly used to analyse protest events, but their methodological implications are rarely made transparent. This article provides a systematic documentation of a protest event analysis using a major commercial news repository, critically examines the biases, gaps, and limitations it introduces, and proposes best practices for researchers using similar data sources.
Why it matters: A methodological contribution with wide applicability — essential reading for any researcher using news data to study collective action.
Journal Article
2022
Felipe G. Santos and Dorit Geva
European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology
This article analyses how far-right and conservative groups in the European Parliament systematically disrupted deliberations on sexual health and reproductive rights through procedural obstruction, amendment flooding, and coordinated discursive strategies. Drawing on a dataset of parliamentary debates and voting records, it documents how anti-gender actors translated a broader cultural mobilisation into concrete legislative outcomes.
Why it matters: Shows how anti-democratic strategies operate at the supranational level — the European Parliament as a battlefield in the culture war against gender equality.
Journal Article
2021
Felipe G. Santos and Dorit Geva
International Affairs
Europe's far-right parties have created a network of training schools and ideological academies to form a new political elite and advance an alternative vision of international order — one premised on civilisational nationalism, opposition to liberal internationalism, and the defence of traditional values against 'globalist' institutions. This article analyses four such schools, their curricula, their funding, their transnational networks, and the vision of world order they promote.
Why it matters: Exposes the long-term intellectual infrastructure of the European far right — revealing that its challenge to liberal democracy is not just electoral but organisational and ideational.
Journal Article
2020
Felipe G. Santos
Social Movement Studies
This article introduces the concept of the 'politics of care' to the social movement literature, drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork with Spain's PAH. It argues that empathy and solidarity — typically understood as emotional dimensions of activism — function as strategic political tools that enable social movements to build power, sustain commitment, and generate political transformation among participants.
Why it matters: The original theoretical statement of the 'politics of care' argument — foundational for the 2024 book and cited widely in the care and movements literature.
Book Chapter
2022
Felipe G. Santos
In Snow et al. (eds.), The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements (2nd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.
An encyclopaedia entry synthesising the emerging literature on care and social movements — tracing the concept's origins in feminist theory, its application to movement contexts, and the key debates about how care shapes collective action, activist well-being, and movement sustainability.
Why it matters: The authoritative reference entry on this topic in the leading reference work in the field.
Book Chapter
2022
Felipe G. Santos and Montserrat Emperador Badimon
In Betancor & Razquin (eds.), Diez años construyendo ciudadanía en movimiento(s). Bellaterra.
This chapter analyses how the PAH's practice of transversality — its organisational commitment to crossing class, ethnic, and political boundaries — operated in practice through specific caring routines and collective intelligence mechanisms. Drawing on participant observation and interviews, it shows how these practices enabled the movement to build an unusually broad social coalition.
Why it matters: A detailed account of how political values translate into organisational practices — relevant for activists and scholars of movement building alike.
Book Chapter
2022
Felipe G. Santos
In Santos et al. (eds.), La Plataforma de Afectados Por la Hipoteca. Bellaterra Editorial.
A narrative reconstruction of the PAH's first successful eviction blockade — the founding moment that defined the movement's identity, tactics, and emotional culture. The chapter uses this single event to trace the role of care, embodied presence, and collective solidarity in enabling ordinary people to confront the state and financial institutions.
Why it matters: A rare micro-sociological account of a founding movement moment — showing how a single act of collective care catalysed a decade of political transformation.
Book Chapter
2024
Methodological Pluralism in the Study of Political Participation
Santos, F. G.
In: Bruter, M. & Harrison, S. (eds.), Handbook of Political Participation. Routledge.
Argues for methodological pluralism in the study of political participation, drawing on the complementarity of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods approaches to capture the full range of participatory acts.
Why it matters: Addresses the methodological fragmentation in participation research and proposes an integrative framework.