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Multiple studies in political science consistently hold that left-wing ideology renders individuals more prone to protest behavior. However, the familiar association between left-wing ideology and protesting is not empirically corroborated in all democratic nations. Building on existing theoretical principles and applying them to diverse political contexts, this article sheds light on puzzling variation in protest behavior across new and old democracies. It argues that it is not the left that engenders protest. Instead, we demonstrate that which political camp engages in protest behavior depends on its historical legacies and cultural liberalism. Historical legacies reflect the ideological configuration at democratization. Protesting tends to be more common in the ideological camp that opposed the pre-democratic political order. Simultaneously, it is culturally liberal individuals who more likely embrace protest participation, independent of their left–right identification. These theoretical expectations are supported through survey data analyses, explaining contrasting inter- and intra-regional variation in European democracies.

Protest ist zu einem fixen Bestandteil unserer Gesellschaft geworden. Christoph J. Virgl analysiert Protest in seiner vielfältigen Bedeutung. Der Protest ist in seiner Einfachheit unnachahmbar und dennoch vermittelt uns jeder Protest mehr Weltwissen, als wir täglich in Politik und Massenmedien vermittelt bekommen. Kaum eine Formensprache schafft es in der modernen Gesellschaft besser, Konflikte und Widersprüche sichtbar zu machen. Es bleibt daher festzuhalten: Man muss nicht jeden Protest mittragen; aber kein Protest wäre unerträglich.

Abstract
On September 9, 2020, members of the Colombian national police killed Javier Ordóñez, a young lawyer from Bogotá. This event generated public outrage, sparking a wave of protests that lasted six days and left at least 12 people dead and 435 injured, among them civilians and police officers. This essay analyzes the dynamics of these protests to understand whether the collective action of citizens should be attributed to a structured process of conflict that aspires to social change or, on the contrary, to a particular form of frustration-aggression where factors indirectly affecting collective individualities—beliefs, customs, world views, rights, and obligations—prevailed.

In young democracies with weak parties, there is some evidence that partisan identification may shift in response to short-term government performance. The massive protests that erupted in Brazil in June 2013 sharply increased the salience of, and public attention to, poor government performance and took most observers by surprise. They were also widely depicted as nonpartisan or even antipartisan. We use two well-timed surveys to examine the effects of the protests on mass partisanship. We find that the protests led to increased nonpartisanship and decreased attachment to the governing Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' Party, PT) among the public as a whole. We also show that small leftist parties were more broadly represented among protesters than has been previously recognized. (GIGA)

This article examines the relationship between participation in the Catholic Church and the consciousness and protest behavior of the most strategic sector of the Peruvian labor force. It explores two ideal models of church influence: traditional and liberation. Although Liberation Theology has some of its deepest roots in the writings and practice of Peruvian priests, the association between participation in church ritual in general in Peru and the consciousness and behavior of workers suggests that the overall influence of the Peruvian Church is best described by the traditional model. Participation in Church ritual and its associated religiosity increase fatalism, retards concientizacion, reduces protest participation, and integrates workers into the hierarchy and discipline of the industrial enterprise. The article agrees with Gramsci (1971) that the control of consciousness is as significant an area of political struggle as the control of production, and that the two are related. Through its influence on social consciousness, the church can indirectly affect political action and national patterns of production and distribution. Church acculturation may affect economic growth rate by reducing worker-management and worker-state conflict. It seems equally likely that the conservative effect of church acculturation increases distributional inequality.

Understanding of the phenomenon of political protest has been inhibited by the view that protest is fundamentally extraordinary or unconventional in character and that those who use it do so because they lack the resources to employ more conventional means of political expression. This article challenges this unqualified view by examining survey data based on black and white samples from the city of Milwaukee which relate to racial attitudes toward protest, the social characteristics of protest participants, and to the uses and organization of protest in the two racial communities. The analysis reveals widespread support for protest in the black community in contrast to the general antipathy found among whites. Both black and white protesters are found to be socioeconomically better-off than nonprotesters in their respective racial communities, but a variety of indicators suggest that black protesters are more integrated and typical members of their community than white protesters are of theirs. Data on the uses and organization of protest show that it has become an institutionalized feature of the black pursuit of urban politics in Milwaukee in contrast to its generally ad hoc and less frequent role for whites.We may conclude from all this that protest represents a widely accepted, integral part of black politics in the city, while for whites protest is indeed unconventional, a violation of dominant social norms. This conclusion is used as a basis for speculating on the relationship of protest participation to the possession of social resources and on the capacity of social resources to offset the costs incurred in the form of social disapproval for violating white norms against protest behavior.

Do people signal protest by bringing out a protest vote when they feel they have been collectively disadvantaged? Political scientists have been interested in "protest voting" yet theoretical understanding is limited. Social psychologists have studied other forms of collective protest extensively. The present study integrates insights from the political science approach to protest voting and the social psychological approach to protest behavior to study how a context of perceived collective disadvantage influences voting for protest parties. We conducted a field study with a quasi-experimental design. This allowed us to study effects of a plausibly exogenous variable-the presence versus absence of societal disadvantage (the experience of man-made earthquakes)-on both determinants of and on subsequent protest voting. Results reveal that the presence of earthquakes affects levels of protest voting via (national) trust, regional identification, and perceptions of efficacy.

We examine the extent to which personality traits and variables based on the theory of collective action (i.e., incentives) can explain protest participation. We use the Big Five personality traits, measured by a list of bipolar adjectives: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Incentives are political discontent and perceived personal influence, perceived obligation to protest and social incentives (i.e., integration in protest encouraging social networks). We hypothesize that personality traits have an effect on incentives and, together with incentives, on protest behavior. We test our hypotheses with a two-wave panel study, conducted in Leipzig (East Germany), where a total of 438 persons were interviewed in 1993 and 1996. Major findings are that personality traits have only weak effects on protest, compared to the variables of the theory of collective action, and that personality traits have, various effects on the independent variables (i.e., the incentives) of the theory of collective action. Adapted from the source document.

Several individual-level causes of protest behavior suggested by Western research are investigated in the case of the People's Republic of China, based on a secondary analysis of mail survey data from 2,500+ urban working residents, collected just 3 months before the 1989 massive upheaval. Path analysis reveals that age, education, & Communist party membership had both direct & indirect impacts on protest, in an expected way. Income had only an indirect effect, whereas the impact of gender was not significant because the direct & indirect effects countered each other. Occupation made no difference, while discontent with economic reforms, distrust in the government, aspirations for Western democracy, & disillusionment with communist ideology all significantly enhanced protest behavior. Postmaterialist values, which contribute positively to political protest in the West, play a suppressor role in the Chinese context. Implications for comparative research on public opinion & political behavior are discussed. 2 Tables, 1 Appendix, 24 References. Adapted from the source document.