CAICG aspires to explain developments in the Greek political setting during the sovereign debt crisis which erupted in 2010, focusing on the causes and consequences of protest activity. What brought people with scarcely any prior experience in demonstrations to Syntagma square? How did parties and individual politicians react to the accumulation of discontent?  
 
We address these questions by following Hirschman's exit-voice-loyalty model. In so doing, we reflect on issues such as why people are driven from exit to voice and vice versa, and how loyalty manifests itself in the newly emerging political environment. We propose an encompassing analytical framework based on
three building blocks: a) public opinion and change in its political predispositions (the demand-side); b) political parties and other institutional factors (the supply side); c) the intervening role of conventional and social media.

We propose a variety of design-based identification methods to unpack causal relationships between attitudes, strategic elite behavior, and protest activity. We evaluate competing models of political participation and focus on the feedback loop between populism and protest.