Chapter 7 - Context Matters, But How?

Summary

The decision to protest is not taken in a social vacuum. Therefore we devote Chapter 7 to the contextual opportunities and constraint to protest. Social cleavages, political opportunity structures, and repression define the opportunities and constraints imposed by the economic, political-institutional, and cultural context. We describe how context influences demand, supply, and mobilization and how citizens are influenced by these factors. First, we devote attention to the important methodological issue on the need for comparative research designs in investigating how the socio-political context influences citizens’ political participation. Followed by an introduction of the context proper. We describe how the economic, political-institutional, and cultural context combined shapes the contextualization of the social psychology of protest. And, on its turn, how the demand and supply of protest is shaped by these contextual factors, whether protests are mobilized, and, if so, what types of protest. Finally, we illustrate contextualized contestation from a large comparative study of movement and party politics in diverging contexts. We show how contextual variation – “old” and “new” democracies, and new democracies further specified into “post-communist” and “post-authoritarian” regimes – marks the issues citizens worry about and the kind of political participation they undertake in their attempts to tackle these issues.