Cleavage theory suggests that citizens’ positions in social conflicts impact political participation. However, how do patterns of political mobilization change in relation to both positions in social conflicts and objective disadvantage across sociodemographic characteristics? While disadvantaged minorities may detach from politics, research on intersectionality and political participation shows that, under certain conditions, citizens from intersectional minorities may become more politically active than their advantaged counterparts. Bridging cleavage theory and intersectionality studies, we analyze how intersectional disadvantage moderates the effect of being ‘challenger’ in societal conflicts on political interest and participation. We leverage original survey data on eight societal conflicts across seven Western European countries. Collected in 2024, these data include items that capture individuals’ positions in conflicts and how relevant the latter are considered. We construct both a summary index of sociodemographic disadvantage and a measure of positions in conflicts weighted by their salience, subsequently running country-fixed effects regression models with interaction terms. We find that political interest rises and propensity to abstain decreases as sociodemographic disadvantage increases for respondents on the challenger side of conflicts, albeit to varying degrees. This confirms our hypothesis that respondents’ sociodemographic disadvantage moderates the effect of being on the challenger side of societal conflicts on political mobilization: the more ‘intersectionally disadvantaged’ those on the challenger side of a societal conflict are, the more politically engaged and likely to vote they become. Hence, people’s positions in societal conflicts matter for political mobilization and sociodemographic disadvantage plays a key moderating role in this process.
