Patterns of political protest display distinctive features in different places and at different times. For example, people in different countries or cultural settings deploy symbols in protesting that do not necessarily travel well. Argentine protesters who jangled keys in 2002 to symbolize that their homes and businesses were being jeopardized by economic crisis would have a hard time decoding the bowler hats and sashes of Orangemen marching on the streets of Belfast. Different people also resort to different actions to express their discontent. In the period of post-Communist economic crisis, thousands of Hungarians and Slovaks issued open letters and signed petitions demanding help in their plight. Poles, on the other hand, were much more likely to go on strike or occupy public buildings (Ekiert and Kubik 1998). Russians, as we have seen, resorted with surprising frequency to direct actions and to the rather unusual practice of hunger striking in shifts, which meant that hunger strikes could last for many, many months.

Particularities aside, I have laid out in this book features that we can expect to apply across a broad range of hybrid political regimes. Specifically, I have argued that an organizational ecology dominated by the state, by state-supported remnants of the previous regime, and by ersatz social movements leads to patterns of protest in which elite politics plays a central role. Under these circumstances, the volume of protest is likely to follow elite political dynamics very closely.