The chapter explores viewpoint across various topics and genres of political discourse. Viewpoint is defined as a pervasive property of language and conceptualisation which is exhibited across a broad range of linguistic and conceptual phenomena. The chapter starts by looking at deixis and deictic shifts in media discourses of immigration and political protests. The ideological role of viewpoints evoked by transitive versus reciprocal verbs is also considered in the context of media coverage of political protests. Subjective versus objective construal is further analysed as a viewpoint phenomenon and the role of objective construals in official communication around Covid-19 is highlighted. Viewpoint as an inherent feature in the mental spaces networks configured in response to modal and conditional constructions are considered in the context of Brexit discourse. Finally, conducted within the framework of discourse space theory, an analysis is given of distance and proximity (relative to a deictically specified viewpoint) in the discourse of the far-right organisation Britain First.

Causal studies on the relationship between wellbeing and political participation have produced mixed results. Happier voters are found to be more engaged in some contexts but not others. In the Arab world, low wellbeing was a strong precedent and predictor of future uprisings. This relationship appears to be slightly weaker in Western countries.

Overall, there is strong evidence that happiness predicts higher levels of support for the incumbent political party. This effect has been found in a number of countries and using a variety of different analytic methodologies, including propensity score matching techniques and natural experiments. In many cases, this effect is even stronger than standard economic models of voter preferences.

Around the world, unhappier voters are also more likely to vote for populist parties and identify with populist ideologies. However, studies performed on elections in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States have found mostly mixed results regarding the extent to which life satisfaction in particular is predictive of populist electoral victories.

In this chapter, Sa’dallah Wannous’ friend Farouk Mardam-Bey, one of Syria’s foremost intellectuals living in exile, who is also the most respected doyen of Arabic literature in French translation, shares anecdotes about Wannous. He focuses on the years Wannous spent as a student in Paris from 1966 to 1968, a formative period in his apprenticeship, during which he immersed himself in the rich and tumultuous cultural and political life of Paris. Mardam-Bey argues that in addition to questioning the ambiguous relationship that existed between Europe and the Arab world, Wannous also interrogated the relationship among literature, theatre and spectacle in the contemporary world and was particularly intrigued by the association between political protest and theatre, both in conventional theatres and on the streets. The chapter's purpose is to highlight that Wannous’ encounters and friendships with a host of writers and artists from France, the Arab world and other post-colonial countries deeply affected his trajectory and writing.

Since the 1970s, the focus of contentious protest, as well as of the corresponding research, has increasingly moved from economic issues to the cultural issues associated with the new social movements. With Europe experiencing the most severe economic crisis in decades, we ask if the return of hard times has changed the distribution of contention over the different policy domains. Drawing on a dataset covering more than 30.000 protest events in thirty European countries from 2000 to 2015 and the issues and actors involved in each event, we analyse how the salience of cultural, political, and economic issues in the protest arena changes over time across countries and regions. We find evidence for a reinvigoration of economic protest particularly in southern Europe, a region that was strongly affected by the economic crisis. However, the varying crisis experiences also served to channel economic grievances into other issues: Governments deflected blame for austerity packages onto international institutions and right-wing challengers mobilized economic fears by promising more exclusive welfare benefits. Hence, the economic crisis was also addressed in political and cultural terms. Finally, we show that when the Euro-crisis ended, the migration crisis began to affect the protest arena.