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² Gray, for example, argued that “the human and social costs of transition to a market economy are for most of the post-Communist states so great that it is foolish to suppose that the transition can be conducted under liberal democratic institutions.” Gray, John, “From Postcommunism to Civil Society: The Reemergence of History and the Decline of the Western Model,” in Paul, Ellen Frankel, Miller, Fred D., and Paul, Jeffrey, eds., Liberalism and the Economic Order (London: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 44.Google Scholar

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⁵ These ideas are developed by Ragin. The concept of conjunctural causation serves to indicate that in the social world causes work in interaction with each other and their effects on the dependent/explained variable are not merely additive. The concept of multiple causation indicates that there may be several combinations of independent variables (conditions or factors) that produce the same outcome (dependent variable). See Ragin, Charles, The Comparative Method: Moving beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

⁶ For the elaboration of this point, see Ekiert, Grzegorz and Kubik, Jan, Collective Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland, 1989–1993, Pew Papers on Central Eastern European Reform and Regionalism, no. 3 (Princeton: Center of International Studies, Princeton University, 1997)Google Scholar.

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¹⁰ See Kitschelt, Herbert, “Comparative Historical Research and Rational Choice Theory: The Case of Transition to Democracy,” Theory and Society 22 (1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹⁵ For the most recent examples of this growing interest in the role of civil society in democratization, see Tarrow, Sidney, “Mass Mobilization and Regime Change: Pacts, Reform, and Popular Power in Italy (1918–1922) and Spain (1975–1978),” in Gunther, Richard, Diamandouros, Nikiforos, and Puhle, Hans-Jurgen, eds., The Politics of Democratic Consolidation: Southern Europe in Comparative spective (Baltimore; Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Perez-Dias, Victor, The Return of Civil Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Bermeo, Nancy, “Myths of Moderation: Confrontation and Conflict during Democratic Transitions,” Comparative Politics 29 (April 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schmitter, Philippe, “Civil Society and the Consolidation of Democracy” (Manuscript, Stanford University, 1996)Google Scholar; Fish, Stephen, Democracyfrom Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Oxhorn, Philip D., Organizing Civil Society: The Popular Sectors and the Strugglefor Democracy in Chile (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ See, for example, Tilly, Charles, Tilly, Louise, and Tilly, Richard, The Rebellious Century, 1830–1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tilly, Charles, The Contentious French (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This regularity is confirmed by all systematic studies of protest in contemporary societies.

¹⁷ See, for example, an impressive series of studies produced by the Center for the Study of Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, and coordinated by Richard Rose; Peter McDonough, Barnes, Samuel H., and Pina, A. Lopez, “The Growth of Democratic Legitimacy in Spain,” American Political Science Review 80, no. 3 (1986)Google Scholar; Zagorski, Krzysztof, “Hope Factor, Inequality, and Legitimacy of Systemic Transformations: The Case of Poland,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 27, no. 4 (1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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²⁰ We define the protest event as collective action by at least three people who set out to articulate specific demands. Our database includes also extreme, politically motivated acts such as self-immolation, hunger strikes, or acts of terror carried out by individuals. In order to qualify as a protest event, such action cannot be the routine or legally prescribed behavior of a social or political organization. Strikes, rallies, or demonstrations are considered to be protest events for the purpose of our analysis because of their radical and disruptive nature. For various definitions of events used in event analysis, see Olzak (fn. 19), 124–27. From 1989 to 1994 none of the four countries experienced the sort of governmental censorship that would systematically distort information on protest activities.

²¹ Tilly, Charles, From Mobilization to Revolution (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), 162-64Google Scholar.

²² More than 50 percent of the values are missing in our Polish, Slovak, and Hungarian databases for several calendar years.

²³ The validity of a synthetic construct or category can be improved by increasing the number of independent measures on which it is based and finding such measures as strongly correlate with each other; see Weber, Robert Philip, Basic Content Analysis (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1990), 18–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Since our index of magnitude is based on only one measure (duration), its validity is weak. But we traded validity for higher accuracy.

²⁴ Another index of magnitude, based partially on the “numbers of participants” variable (whose missing values were estimated), produced almost identical approximations of protest dynamics between 1989 and 1993.

²⁵ Tarrow, Sidney, “Cycles of Collective Action: Between Moments of Madness and the Repertoire of Contention,” in Traugott, Mark, ed., Repertoires and Cycles of Collective Action (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

²⁶ New social movements organized 36.1 percent or protests in France, 73.2 percent in Germany, 65.4 percent in the Netherlands, and 61.0 percent in Switzerland. See Duyvendak, Jan Willem and Kriesi, Hanspeter, “National Cleavage Structures,” in Kriesi, Hanspeter et al. , New Social Movements in Western Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 20.Google Scholar

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²⁹ In the words of Gissendanner and Wielgohs:

The transformation of east Germany differed from the post-socialist norm because of three particular circumstances: (1) east Germany received a well-balanced and proven institutional system with unification; (2) the east German transformation was dominated by external (west German) actors who were empowered by their experience with this institutional system; (3) eastern Germans benefited from massive financial transfers which compensated for the social costs of economic reforms and which financed infrastructure investment.

See Gissendanner, Scott and Wielgohs, Jan, “Einheit und Differenz: The Transformation of East Germany in Comparative Perspective,” German Politics 6 (August 1997), 181.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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³³ Relative deprivation is “a perceived discrepancy between men's value expectations and their value capabilities. Value expectations are the goods and conditions of life to which people believe they are rightfully entitled. Values capabilities are goods and conditions they think they are capable of attaining or maintaining, given the social means available to them.” Gurr, , Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 13.Google Scholar

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³⁵ Rose, Richard and Haerpfer, Christian, Change and Stability in the New Democracies Barometer: A Trend Analysis (Glasgow: Center for the Study of Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, 1996)Google Scholar.

³⁶ David Mason, “Attitudes towards the Market and the State in Postcommunist Europe” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, 1992), 14. The index of alienation, reported by Mason, is the mean response (for a sample of respondents from each country) on four five-point scaled questions. Hungary's index was the highest in the whole sample: 3.61. Poland's was the fourth highest (3.27); East Germany's, ninth (2.94); Czechoslovakia's, tenth (2.91). The study was conducted in the spring and summer of 1991.

³⁷ Ferge, Zsusa, “The Evaluation of Freedom, Security, and Regime Change” (Paper prepared for the Euroconference on Social Policy, organized by ICCR-Vienna, Lisbon, November 8–11, 1995)Google Scholar. Ferge presents results of the Social Consequences of the Transformation Survey administered in 1994.

³⁸ Kopstein, Jeffrey, “Weak Foundations under East German Reconstruction,” Transition 26 (January 1996), 64.Google Scholar Cumulative transfer of funds into the former East Germany reached $494,039,000 by 1995, while Hungary received $10,634,000 of foreign investment, Poland $6,459,000, and Slovakia $483,000.

³⁹ Only in 1990 and 1989 did the Polish economy have a lower GDP growth rate than the Hungarian and Slovak economies, and it was only minimally lower. Moreover, its economy began growing already in 1992, while the other two economies kept declining (negative growth rates) throughout the entire period under study. See Svejnar, Jan, “Economic Transformation in Central and East Europe: The Task Still Ahead” (Paper presented at the meeting of the Per Jacobsson Foundation, Washington, D.C., October 8, 1995)Google Scholar; and World Development Report: From Plan to Market (New York; Oxford University Press, 1996), 173Google Scholar.

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⁴⁰ The most salient changes in opportunity structure are four: the opening up of access to participation, shirts in ruling alignments, the availability of influential allies, and cleavages within and among elites”; Tarrow, Sidney, Power in Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 86.Google Scholar

⁴² See debates on cycles of protest and especially Doug McAdam, “‘Initiator’ and ‘Spin-off’ Movements: Diffusion Processes in Protest Cycles,” in Mark Traugott (fn. 25).

⁴³ For an analysis of the significance of such mechanisms, see Kriesi (fn. 40), 173–79.

⁴⁴ This constitutes a corroboration of Eisinger's thesis, which posits that protest is most likely “in systems characterized by a mix of open and closed factors.” See Tarrow (fn. 41), 86.

⁴⁵ This explanation draws on the logic of historical institutionalism, as defined by Hall and Taylor. Historical institutionalists, while searching for explanations of group conflict, began paying “greater attention to the way in which institutions structure political interactions” and “began to argue that other [than state] social and political institutions could also contribute to political outcomes by structuring conflict among individuals or groups over scarce resources.” Hall, Peter A. and Taylor, Rosemary C. R., “Political Science and the Three New Instirutionalisms,” Political Studies 44, no. 3 (1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁴⁷ Wallace and Jenkins (fn. 46), 134.

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⁵⁰ Ruud Koopmans and Hanspeter Kriesi, “Institutional Structures and Prevailing Strategies,” in Kriesi etal. (fn. 26), 50.

⁵¹ However, a very recent tradition of demonstrations developed in some locations. See, for example, Lohmann, Susanne, “Dynamics of Informational Cascades: The Monday Demonstrations in Leipzig, East Germany, 1989–91,” World Politics 47 (October 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁵⁵ Bresser Pereira, Maravall, and Przeworski (fn. 13), 4.

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⁶⁰ Balcerowicz, Leszek, Wolnosc 1rozwoj (Krakow: Znak, 1995), 372.Google Scholar