Résumé

The recent wave of farmers’ protests across Europe signaled widespread dissatisfaction within the agricultural sector. While the protests have received considerable public and media attention—often framed in relation to far-right mobilization—they have also initatited notable policy responses at both national and EU levels. While low farm incomes and restrictive environmental regulations are common grievances, little is known about individual farmers’ motivations for protesting and the extent to which these complaints align with policy responses. We use data from a large sample of farmers (n = 2,232) assembled through surveys in Germany, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. To elicit unprompted, top-of-mind concerns, we use an open-ended question asking farmers to explain reasons for protesting. This provides rich text data, which we analyze using a combination of hand and AI-assisted coding, as well as text analyses techniques such as keyness analysis and structural topic modeling. We compare protest reasons across countries and political orientation (in the German sample), assess emotional tone of farmers’ answers and
examine how these concerns align with subsequent policy responses and electoral programs.
Our findings indicate that farmers’ main protest reasons differ across the four countries, with German farmers mainly complaining about bureacuracy, French farmers about financial reasons, Belgian farmers express diverse complaints, while Dutch farmers focus on the political environment. Considering the emotional tone of farmers’ answers reveals that certain topics are articulated in a more aggressive angry tone, while other topics seem to trigger annoyed anger. Linking farmers’ protest reasons to EU and national policy responses, shows that while some key complaints received adequate poliy attention, environmental complaints were disproportionally prioritized by policy makers. Focusing on German farmers specifically, we find that 63% of farmers self-categorize into centre-left (with the majority being centre) and 37% as being centre-right. The text analysis reveals significant differences in how frequent certain complaints are
mentioned and how they are expressed by the two groups. Finally, a comparison between German farmers’ grievances and the electoral programs of major German parties reveals very limited overlap.
The findings from this study have important implications with potential to improve the effectiveness of policy responses by contributing to finding adequate solutions to ease farmers’ grievances.

Informations pratiques