In the contemporary ‘age of participation’, referendums are often celebrated as cornerstones of democratic engagement. Yet political parties sometimes take the seemingly paradoxical step of calling for referendum boycotts, urging citizens to abstain from direct democratic processes. This paper investigates the conditions under which such boycott calls occur and the motivations behind them. While previous research has largely focused on single cases or experimental designs, we offer the first comprehensive, comparative study of party-led referendum boycotts across Europe since 1972. Drawing on a novel dataset of 223 referendums in 37 countries, we combine quantitative and qualitative methods to explore how regime context, institutional design, and issue type shape boycott behavior. Our regression analyses show that turnout quorum requirements, lower levels of democratic maturity, and sovereignty-related referendum issues significantly increase the likelihood of boycotts. To complement these findings, we qualitatively analyze boycott justifications and develop a typology of six motivation types: legitimacy-based, procedural unfairness, instrumental, tactical, minority interest, and ideological boycotts. These results reveal a complex interplay between democratic institutions and political strategy, challenging the assumption that referendums are universally inclusive tools. Our findings have implications for the design, interpretation, and normative evaluation of direct democratic practices across diverse political systems.

When a country sees multiple mass mobilisations over time, what accounts for variation in where protest occurs across the different protest waves? This article examines the case of mass protests in Ukraine 1990-2004, exploring how the emergence and development of activist networks aligns with changes in the geospatial dispersion of protest over time. It draws on archives and interviews with activists made available by The Three Revolutions Project, and newspaper reports from Ukrainska Pravda, Korrespondent.net and Radio Svoboda, utilising protest event analysis, along with QGIS software to visually represent findings. The article presents novel empirical findings on the geospatial scope of protest events across Ukraine from 1990 onwards, and demonstrates some of the ways in which regional activist networks expanded, developed, and sought cross-cleavage collaboration, aiming to facilitate increasing nationwide mobilisation. It provides valuable context for understanding subsequent Ukrainian mobilisation, such as the 2013-14 Euromaidan protest, and ongoing resistance to Russia’s full-scale invasion.

This essay considers how the rural and tribal have been obscured from prevailing scholarly accounts of unrest and protest in the years since the Arab Uprisings of 2010–2012, and what this might mean for wider scholarly theorizations of protest and revolution. It draws on fieldwork in central Jordan, especially with Hirak Dhiban, where historical circumstances render visible dynamics also significant elsewhere. It takes as a heuristic binary two broad discursive modalities of seemingly dissimilar collective action that in fact reference and relate to each other in various revealing ways: on the one hand the politically populist and self-consciously leftist Hirak protest movements, prominent in the waves of protest since 2011, and on the other hosha—"tribal clashes.” It considers how contestations over the legitimacy, revolutionary potential, and moral valence of protests often hinge on discursive claims that, in a sense, Hirak is hosha, or hosha, Hirak. It engages with anthropological theories to interpret protest as a generative and affective process, rooted in local histories and imaginaries, even while responding to wider events. It calls for a broader reappraisal of where revolutionary potential is located and how it is recognized in anthropological and historical scholarship.

The economic crisis that started in 2008 has negatively affected European nations to different degrees. The sudden rise in demonstrations particularly in those countries most hard hit by the crisis suggests that grievance theories, dismissed in favour of resource‐based models since the 1970s, might have a role to play in explaining protest behaviour. While most previous studies have tested these theories at the individual or contextual levels, it is likely that mechanisms at both levels are interrelated. To fill this lacuna, this article examines the ways in which individual‐level grievances interact with macro‐level factors to impact on protest behaviour. In particular, it examines whether the impact of individual subjective feelings of deprivation is conditional on contextual macroeconomic and policy factors. It is found that while individual‐level relative deprivation has a direct effect on the propensity to have protested in the last year, this effect is greater under certain macroeconomic and political conditions. Both significant results for the cross‐level interactions are interpreted in terms of their role for opening up political opportunities for protest among those who feel they have been most deprived in the current crisis. These findings suggest that the interaction of the contextual and individual levels should continue to be explored in future studies in order to further clarify the mechanisms underlying protest behaviour.

What explains far‐right mobilisation in the protest arena? After decades of growing electoral support and policy influence, the far right is experiencing an increase in grassroots mobilisation. Scholars of social movements and political parties have devoted little attention to the determinants of far‐right protest mobilisation in Europe. In this article, we bridge previous research on the far right and social movements to advance hypotheses on the drivers of far‐right protest mobilisation based on grievances, opportunities and resource mobilisation models. We use an original dataset combining novel data on 4,845 far‐right protest events in 11 East and West European countries (2008–2018), with existing measures accounting for the (political, economic and cultural) context of mobilisation. We find that classical approaches to collective action can be fruitfully applied to the study of the far right. Cultural grievances, notably concerns about immigration, as well as the availability of institutional access points in contexts characterised by divided government increase far‐right protest mobilisation. But far‐right protest mobilisation also rests on the organisational resources available to nativist collective actors, that is, the network in which they are embedded, their visibility in the media and elected officials. These findings have important implications to understand far‐right success in advanced democracies. They show that far‐right mobilisation in the protest arena not only rests on favourable circumstances, but also on whether far‐right actors can profit from them. More broadly, the study links party politics and social movement research to grasp the far right's modes of political contestation, locating research on this phenomenon at the intersection of political sociology and comparative politics.

Despite the voluminous literature on the ‘normalisation of protest’, the protest arena is seen as a bastion of left‐wing mobilisation. While citizens on the left readily turn to the streets, citizens on the right only settle for it as a ‘second best option’. However, most studies are based on aggregated cross‐national comparisons or only include Northwestern Europe. We contend the aggregate‐level perspective hides different dynamics of protest across Europe. Based on individual‐level data from the European Social Survey (2002–2016), we investigate the relationship between ideology and protest as a key component of the normalisation of protest. Using hierarchical logistic regression models, we show that while protest is becoming more common, citizens with different ideological views are not equal in their protest participation across the three European regions. Instead of a general left predominance, we find that in Eastern European countries, right‐wing citizens are more likely to protest than those on the left. In Northwestern and Southern European countries, we find the reverse relationship, left‐wing citizens are more likely to protest than their right‐wing counterparts. Lessons drawn from the protest experience in Northwestern Europe characterised by historical mobilisation by the New Left are of limited use for explaining the ideological composition of protest in the Southern and Eastern European countries. We identify historical and contemporary regime access as the mechanism underlying regional patterns: citizens with ideological views that were historically in opposition are more likely to protest. In terms of contemporary regime access, we find that partisanship enhances the effect of ideology, while ideological distance from the government has a different effect in the three regions. As protest gains in importance as a form of participation, the paper contributes to our understanding of regional divergence in the extent to which citizens with varying ideological views use this tool.

This paper studies the interactions between governments, challengers and third party actors in the context of 60 contentious policy episodes in 12 European countries during the Great Recession. More specifically, we focus on the endogenous dynamics that develop in the course of these episodes. Based on the combination of a new event dataset, which allows for the construction of action sequences, and a novel method (contentious episode analysis) to study the impact of actor‐specific actions on subsequent actions within a sequence, we test a set of hypotheses on the determinants of actors’ overall action repertoires within specific contexts. Overall, our results are more supportive of the interdependence of cooperation than of the interdependence of conflict: the repression‐radical mobilisation‐external legitimation of conflictive behaviour nexus is weaker than the concession‐cooperation‐mediation nexus. While the literature tends to focus on conflict dynamics, we find that there is a more systematic dynamics of cooperation in the course of contentious episodes.

This article argues that the duties to protest and to listen to protest are central democratic obligations required for active citizenship. Section 1 sketches protest as communicative resistance. Section 2 argues that we always have a duty to listen to felicitous protests against injustice and that, under conditions of social uprising, we also have a duty to protest. Section 3 defends a view of protest participation that takes into account subjects’ positionality with respect to the injustice being protested, arguing for the special prerogatives of victims and the duties to defer and yield of non-victims within protest movements. Finally, Section 4 elucidates the notion of giving proper uptake to protest and what I call echoing a protest, that is, expressing communicative solidarity with that protest.

This article outlines a theoretical framework for interpreting the meaning and function of political protest in modern democracies and develops normative criteria for assessing its democratic quality. To allow for a better understanding of how social structures, legal institutions, and political engagement interact in protest, I combine analytical perspectives from social theory and democratic theory. A useful first distinction, I argue, is between reformist and transformative forms of protest. While reformist protest does not challenge the given framework of the modern democratic order, transformative protest politicizes the basic principles of that order. Finally, I develop four criteria to identify emancipatory traits within protest movements: 1) expanding the circle of those who benefit from the fulfillment of democracy's promises; 2) the establishment of discursive democratic spaces; 3) a balance between dramatization and exchange; and 4) a willingness to become someone else.

Protests on the street may last weeks or even months. Why do some people join protests against government wrongdoing on day one while others wait weeks to do so? This article suggests that delay discounting—an important personal trait that decides how much people discount the future pay-off—determines when an individual joins a protest. An analysis of the 2007 Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey reveals that Ukrainians who discounted the future less were much more likely to join the Orange Revolution right after the electoral irregularities of the 2004 run-off election. Weeks passed as they waited in the snow for the Supreme Court required rerun. In contrast, impatient citizens joined the protest several days after the scandal broke. Additional evidence based on a cross-country survey shows that lower levels of delay discounting help explain the consolidation of democracy over time. This evidence linking delay discounting and political participation supports the concept of self-enforcing democracy and helps us understand the conditions under which a democracy may be in peril.

To illuminate the obstacles to the development of a global civil society, the experience of the most developed transnational social movement—the environmental movement—in the most developed supranational political system—the European Union—is considered. National differences are shown to be persistent and there is little evidence of Europeanization. It is argued that the impediments to the development of a global civil society are yet greater and that, despite the advent of antiglobalization protests, global civil society remains an aspiration rather than an accomplished fact.

This study seeks to go beyond the current dichotomous evaluation of the effects of foreign financial patronage (and particularly European funds) in the post-communist civil society. A longitudinal claim-making and micro-frame analysis (1992–2012) of Czech Romani/pro-Romani activists shows that with the influx of European funds there was no significant change in NGOs action repertoire toward protest and contentious collective action as some proponents of the channeling thesis assume. On the other hand, the funding did not bring about the (often mentioned) co-optation and de-mobilization either. Particularly, Romani NGOs did not use protest tactics even before the arrival of foreign patronage, while other types of actors—especially in the informal, grassroots segment of civil society—protested both before and after this funding appeared. Nevertheless, what changed with the arrival of European funds was the discursive repertoire of the Romani and pro-Romani activists. The study concludes that the impacts of European funding also vary according to different civil society sectors and the picture of the impact of funding on post-communist society, in this case in the Czech Republic, is more diversified than previously assumed.

This paper argues that recent struggles against neoliberal axioms such as free trade and open markets have led to a militant reframing of global civil society by grassroots social movements. It contests that this struggle to invest the concept of global civil society with transformative potential rests upon an identifiable praxis, a “strange attractor” that disturbs other civil society actors, through its rearticulation ofa politics that privileges self-organization, direct action, and direct democracy. The paper further suggests that the emergence of this “antagonistic” orientation is best understood through the lens of complexity theory and offers some conceptual tools to begin the process of analyzing global civil society as an outcome and effect of global complexity.

Contemporary democracies show considerable differences in the issue composition of their protest politics, which tends to remain relatively stable over time. In countries like Germany or the Czech Republic, the vast majority of protests have been mobilised around sociocultural issues, such as human rights, peace, nuclear power or the environment, and only a tiny portion of protest has focused on economic issues. At the opposite extreme, protest in France or Poland usually has a strongly economic character and voices demands relating to material redistribution and social policy. What lies behind the cross‐country differences in national protest agendas? In this article, the national protest agenda depends on what issues mainstream political parties are contesting: the content and strength of the master‐issue dimension. In reference to the literature on the multidimensional political space and niche political parties, one should expect that there is a substitutive effect; where the stronger a specific master‐issue dimension is in party politics, the less salient that issue dimension is in protest politics. This substitutive effect results from the tendency of electoral politics to reduce political conflict to a single‐dimension equilibrium, which decreases the importance of other issues and relegates the contest over secondary, niche issues to the realm of policy‐seeking strategies, with protest being a common type of this political strategy. In party systems where single‐dimension equilibrium does not exist and the master‐issue dimension is weaker, the same dynamics result in a more convergent relationship between party and protest politics and a greater similarity between the protest‐ and party‐system agendas. To investigate this theory, the national protest agendas in four countries are examined. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia show four combinations of two crucial factors that are not available in the old Western democracies: the content and the strength of the master‐issue dimension. The study draws on an original dataset of protest events organised in the four countries between 1993 and 2010, and on qualitative and quantitative data on issue dimensions of party politics obtained from studies on party politics and expert surveys. The results show that in the Czech Republic, where the master‐issue dimension has remained strongly economic, protest has been predominantly sociocultural. In Poland between 1993 and 2001 and Hungary between 1993 and 2006, the master‐issue dimensions are strongly sociocultural, while protest is predominantly economic. There is no single‐dimension equilibrium in party politics in Slovakia or in post‐2001 Poland and mainstream parties compete on both economic and sociocultural issues. Consequently, the substitutive dynamics between party and protest politics is weaker and the issue agendas in party and protest arenas are here more alike.

In the US, quarantine requires we stay home, but many do not have homes to stay in or may lose theirs due to job or wage loss. For this reason, moratoria have been put on evictions. At the same time, after the latest police killings, and during ensuing protests against racist policing in June 2020, some were arrested for curfew violations, many pulled off the streets but others out of their homes or off their stoops. A real right to housing addresses both homelessness and uncurbed police powers that round up and break in. To address current emergencies and correct larger wrongs of American life, a rent jubilee would better protect tenants than a moratorium. It could be construed as a “taking,” allowed by the 5th Amendment, compensating landlords for their properties’ being taken to serve a “public use.” Popular takings, too, are rising up on behalf of a right to housing that goes beyond rent moratoria for some and the provision of low-grade “public housing” for others.

This article contrasts the liberal idea of a “sleeping sovereign” with the democratic one of a “sovereign awakened.” The right to protest is defended as an expression of popular sovereignty, envisaged as a right to popular “self-awakening” instigated by an imperative call of duty not reducible to a set of liberal individual rights. In contrast to some approaches of agonistic democracy, it is argued that democratically breaking the rules of the game of liberal democracy is an indispensable dimension of democratic protest. Taking into account Étienne Balibar's thoughts about a rule-breaking right to have rights, it is suggested we revisit the French Constitution of 1793, in which a popular duty to insurrection is enshrined. The article ends with the proposal to supplement insurrectionary accounts of sovereignty with a Gramscian view that would insist on the necessity of hegemonically constructing a democratic “collective will.”

This paper seeks to reconstruct the specific experiences that strengthen or erode the commitment of volunteers in the welfare sector. The empirical basis is narrative interviews with volunteers who have withdrawn from their role at a welfare organisation in Germany. The findings show tensions: on the one hand, experiences of successful relationships with clients and fellow volunteers strengthen volunteers’ commitment. On the other hand, volunteers observe practices and approaches that run counter to their values. This tension between engaging and disengaging experiences arises from the welfare sector itself, for while care can enable close interpersonal experiences, it is also shaped by economisation. Overall, our study shows that the motivations underlying volunteers’ long-term commitment can be both strengthened and undermined by actual volunteering experiences. In the light of our findings, we present heuristics for understanding volunteering processes that focus on field-specific experiences and tensions.