SEMINAR: “ Looking in a Carnival Mirror: Ideology and Protest Participation in Old and New Democracies

What is the relationship between political ideology and protest participation? Since the first empirical works, scientific literature has observed that left-wing individuals are more prone to non-conventional protest activities in West-European established democracies. In contrast, research on post-communist democracies in Central and Eastern Europe has found either no or a reversed relationship. This paper argues that two factors account for this variation: 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. As for cultural liberalism, it is the opposition to the conservative cultural status quo that makes culturally liberal individuals more likely to embrace protest participation. These theoretical expectations are supported through individual-level survey data analyses, explaining both the general difference between the West and the East, as well as finer variation within these regions.