Demand refers to the mobilizing potential in a society for protest; relating to the interest in a society in what a movement stands for. Is the movement addressing a problem people care for? Is there need for a movement on these issues? What personal grievances politicize and translate into political claims, and how? Usually, people who participate in a movement are only a small proportion of those caring about the issue. This is not necessarily a sign of weakness; for a movement to be viable, a large reservoir of sympathizers is needed to nourish its activists. We focus on the social-psychological core of the demand-side of protest, consisting of grievances, efficacy perceptions, identification, emotions, and social embeddedness. Protesters are aggrieved and openly contest established authorities, attempting to change existing power structures. They form the tip of larger masses who feel that their interests and/or values are violated. Indeed, passivity in the face of imperiled interests or violated values is more often the rule rather than the exception. Interestingly, passivity is mainly explained by the absence of theoretically renowned predictors, rather than theoretical approaches for non-participation. Special attention is devoted to theories on non-participation.

Chapter 9 is dedicated to three processes steering the cyclicity of protest, namely politicization, polarization, and radicalization. Simon and Klandermans elaborated on the dynamics of politicization of collective identity. A process of politicization implies support of third parties is sought and the environment becomes divided into allies and opponents. Polarization concerns distancing of the opposing camps. The more polarized the relationship becomes, the less deviation from the group’s opinions and actions is accepted and the more opposing opinions and acts are rejected. Eventually, this may result in radicalization. Also, in declining movements with many “exiters,” sustained participation can indicate radicalization. Take the violent Black Panthers, which played a short but important part in the civil rights movement, believing that Martin Luther King’s non-violent campaign had failed and any promised changes to their lifestyle via the “traditional” civil rights movement would take too long or simply would not be introduced at all. Hence, in light of the declining civil right movement, both disengagement and radical sustained participation were observed. To understand the social psychological correlates of the volatility of protest, politicization, polarization, and radicalization warrants elaborate investigation.

In the concluding chapter, we are reaching the point of assessing what we achieved, which questions we were able to answer, and which remained unanswered. In short, time to take stock. We do so by revisiting the three foci of the book. A first section focusing on the individual as the unit of analysis; next a section positioning the contextualization of contention as focal point; followed by a section on the aftermath of contention for the individual. The final, and fourth, section of this chapter is dedicated to methodology. Here we maintain that, in order to understand contextualized contestation, we need disciplinary collaboration and comparative designs. Indeed, our main argument of the book is that more attention should be placed on what happens before and after mobilization processes, and we hoped to show how a contextualized social psychological approach, with disciplinary collaboration and relying on comparative designs, can open and develop insights into these largely untapped areas.

Chapter 2 discusses the historical and methodological roots of the social psychology of protest, illustrated with meta-analytical data. Social psychology has evolved through two branches, in psychology and in sociology. These clearly differ regarding the level of analysis, basic assumptions, method, and areas of research in studying protest. The roots of the sociological branch are European, contextual, comparative, and non-positivistic. The roots of the psychological branch originate in the United States, where the behavioral and experimental approach dominated. These disciplinary roots are not without consequences for employed methodologies. Sociological social psychologists use shared social knowledge from a macro- or meso-level culture to explain relatively enduring patterns of symbolic social interaction, investigating with qualitative methods, such as discourse analysis, event analysis, interviewing, participant observation, case studies, and network analysis. Psychological social psychologists, alternately, typically look at what leads us to behave in a given way in the (imagined) presence of others, and the conditions under which certain behavior/actions and feelings occur. In general, they have a preference for laboratory-based, empirical findings. Each method has its own strengths, weaknesses, and challenges. We will discuss studies conducted, present illustrative findings from such studies, and indicate the strengths, weaknesses, and challenges of the method.

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.

Chapter 5 discusses the dynamics of supply and the way it impacts on protest participation. Supply refers to the mobilizing context and the opportunities staged by organizers to protest. It relates to characteristics of the movement, and the contemporary more fluid and virtual networks of networks. We will discuss how the issues the actions are aiming at and the various forms they might take impact on their appeal to potential participants. Next, we will introduce the concept of multi-organizational fiels (MOF) and discuss what role embeddedness in MOFs plays in types of civic engagement. We will close the chapter with a discussion of the mechanisms at work in the supply side of protest. We will argue that linked to embeddedness are patterns of identification which make people more or less susceptible to the appeals of one social movement organization over another.

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.

Chapter 6 focuses on the dynamics of mobilization. Mobilization is the process that links demand and supply. It can be seen as the marketing mechanism of the movement domain. Mobilization campaigns attempt to bring demand and supply together. The mobilizing structure organizers assemble is the connecting tissue between the supply-side of organizers and their appeals and the demand-side of participants and their motives. This makes it highly dynamic: a fit – or misfit – between motives and appeals makes for successful or failed mobilization and as such effects movement outcomes and effects. An individual’s participation in a social movement is the outcome of processes of mobilization. Within a society, consensus formation sets the stage for consensus mobilization. Together these two processes build a movement’s mobilization potential for a specific issue. The more successful consensus formation and mobilization has been, the larger the pool of sympathizers a movement can draw from. In a final step, action mobilization turns sympathizers into participants. Each of these processes obeys a separate theoretical framework. This chapter will subsequently elaborate consensus formation, consensus mobilization, and action mobilization. In doing so, we will depart from the explanatory model along the lines of Coleman’s boat, as introduced in Chapter 3.

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.

Chapter 8 discusses dynamics of engagement and disengagement. Drury and Reicher suggests that protest participation generates a “positive social-psychological transformation,” arguing that participation strengthens identification and induces collective empowerment. The emergence of an inclusive self-categorization as “oppositional” leads to feelings of unity and expectations of support. This empowers people to oppose authorities. Such action creates collective self-objectification (i.e., it defines the participant’s identity opposite the dominant outgroup). As such, taking it onto the streets strengthens empowerment and politicization, paving the way to sustained participation. Sustained participation is nearly absent in the social movement literature. Surprisingly, because long-term participants keep movements going. The other side of the coin is disengagement. Again, compared to the abundant literature on why people join movements, literature on why they exit is almost non-existent. Research has centered on the determinants of disengagement, or the future of ex-activists, but rarely on the disengagement process. Indeed, the process of disengagement is highly likely to vary as a function of what provokes it, the costs of disengagement, the manner in which it takes place, and therefore what becomes of those who leave. Chapter 8 will elaborate the social psychological correlates of sustained participation and disengagement.