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.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book, and some words are devoted to the activity of interest: political protest. Institutional and non-institutionalized political activity will be distinguished. We will argue that people embark on institutional political activities in party politics and on non-institutionalized activities in movement politics. Non-institutionalized movement activities are defined as political protest. The central question underlying this volume is: why do some people protest, while others don’t? We aim to merge theory and evidence on protest politics whereby individuals always figure center stage – what are their fears, hopes, and concerns? What groups do they identify with? Are they cynical about politics or do they trust their authorities? What are the choices they make, the motives they have, and the emotions they experience? Why do they decide to stay or, for that matter, radicalize or leave the movement? The book takes a social psychological approach to contention. In doing so, this book provides three unique lenses to social movement literature, namely (1) The individual as a unit of analysis, (2) Contextualization of contestation, and (3) The individual aftermath of contention.

Social psychology is interested in how social context influences individuals’ behavior, focuses on subjective variables, and takes the individual as its unit of analysis, which has important epistemological implications. It implies, inter alia, that questions that take a unit of analysis other than the individual (e.g., a movement, a group, a region, or a country) require other disciplines than social psychology. Hence, social psychology should fare well at explaining why individuals participate or fail to participate in a movement once it has emerged but is not helpful in explaining why social movements emerge or decline. Sociology and political science are better suited for such analyses. Although sociology and political sciences usually do their analyses at levels different than that of the individual, they do build their reasoning on assumptions about individual behavior. This is not to say that every social scientist must become a social psychologist, but it is to say that it is worth the effort to specify the social psychological assumptions that underlie the analyses and to see whether they fit into what social psychologists know about individual behavior. We delineate our disciplinary point of departure and build our model of Contextualized Contestation along the lines of Coleman’s boat.