Contentious Politics in New Democracies:

Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Former

East Germany Since 1989
Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik
Harvard University Rutgers University
Center for European Studies Department of Political Science
Cambridge MA 02138 New Brunswick NJ 08903
Program. on Central and Eastern Europe
Working Paper Series 141
Abstract
The paper reconstructs and explains the patterns of collective protest in four Central European countries,
Hungary, former East Germany, Poland, and Slovakia, dUring the early phases of democratic consolidation
(1989.1994). Analytical perspective is provided by protest event analysis. The empirical evidence comes
from content analysis of several major papers in each country. The patterns found in the data are com
pared with the predictions derived from four theoretical traditions: (a) relative deprivation; (b) instrumen
tal institutionalism; CC) historical-cultural institutionalism; and (d) resource mobilization theory. Two main
conclusions are reached. First, the levels of "objective" or "subjective" deprivation are unrelated to the
magnitude and various feature of protest, which are best explained by a combination of institutional and
resource mobilization theories. Second, democratic consolidation is not necessarily threatened by a high
magnitude of protest. If protest's demands are moderate and its methods routinized, it contributes to the po
litical vitality of new democracies.
I. The location of our project in the literature on democratic
consolidations .1
The research proj ect presented in this paper expands our
understanding of democratic consolidation. The empirical evidence
comes primarily from the systematic data collection on collective
protest during the first years of democratic transition in four
countries: Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the former East Germany.
Our analysis focuses on the neglected dimension of the
postcommunist transformations: contentious action by non-elite
collective actors in four Central European countries. Our aim is to
counter the existing pro-elite bias in the literature, determine
the impact of protest activities on democratization, and to
reconstruct the emerging patterns of the state-society
relationships in the newly democratizing societies.
Conceptualizing and explaining the rapid, unexpected collapse
of state-socialist regimes in East Central Europe in 1989 and the
ensuing efforts at democratization and restructuring of the economy
is a challenge for students of comparative politics. The
simultaneity of the breakdown, despite varied political and
economic conditions in each country, reinforced a notion that these
regimes were basically identical one-party states kept in power by
the Soviet military presence. Additionally, some experts assumed
that in the wake of communism's collapse the new regimes developed
similar structures and faced similar challenges and pressures and
therefore should be treated as a single political type.
1The project was funded by the Program for the Study of
Germany and Europe administered by the Center for European
Studies at Harvard University, the National Council for Soviet
and East European Research and the American Council of Learned
Societies. It was directed by Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik. We
would like to thank Sidney Tarrow for his generous help and
encouragement. For their indispensable assistance and advice our
special gratitude goes to Martha Kubik, Ela Ekiert, Anna
Grzymala-Busse, Jason Wittenberg, Mark Beissinger, Nancy Bermeo,
Valerie Bunce, Ellen Comisso, Bela Greskovits, Janos Kornai,
Michael D. Kennedy, Christiane Lemke, Darina Malova, Alexander
Motyl, Maryjane Osa, Dieter Rucht, Mate Szabo, Anna Seleny, and
Mayer N. Zald.
1
This view is incorrect both with respect to the communist past
and the present developments. East Central European state socialist
regimes underwent complex processes of transformation during their
four decades in power. Domestic political developments differed
from country to country. Specifically, patterns of political
conflict, institutional breakdowns and strategies of regime
reequilibration left long-lasting legacies. As a result of
political crises, fundamental changes and adjustments were
introduced into the political and economic institutions and
practices of these regimes, altering relations between
institutional orders of the party-state, between the state and
society, and producing institutional and policy dissimilarities.
2
Thus each state socialist regime left behind distinct legacies
which should be carefully examined if we are to explain the present
rapidly diverging trajectories of political, social, and economic
changes taking place in the region.
3
Similarly, despite the clustering of regime breakdowns in
1989, there were important differences in the way particular
countries exited state socialism and entered the transition
process. "Pacted" transitions that took place in Poland and Hungary
and displacement of the communist regime through "popular upsurge"
that occurred in Czechoslovakia and the GDR produced different
transitional institutions and patterns of political conflicts.
These distinctive modes of power transfer shaped subsequent
political developments and the capacity of various political actors
in each country.4
2Por the detailed elaboration of this argument see Grzegorz
Ekiert, The State Against Society: Political Crises and Their
Aftermath in East Central Europe, Princeton University Press
1996.
3Por an exemplary effort to correlate developments under
state socialism and their constraining impact on the current
transformation process see Janos Kornai, "Paying the Bill for
Goulash-Communism," Discussion Paper Series No. 1749, Harvard
Institute for Economic Research, Cambridge 1996.
4See , for example, Grzegorz Ekiert, Transitions from State
Socialism in East Central Europe, States and Social Structures
Newsletter, (1990) 12, 1-7; Bartlomiej Kaminski, Systemic
2
Several years after the collapse of the communist rule,
distinctive regions or groups of countries with contrasting
policies and accomplishments have emerged within the former Soviet
bloc. The new, postcommunist regimes have been confronted with
specific challenges engendered by different domestic conditions and
have pursued different strategies of political and economic
reforms. Stark is correct when he argues that we should II regard
East Central Europe as undergoing a plurality of transitions in a
dual sense: across the region, we are seeing a multiplicity of
distinctive strategies; within any given country, we find not one
transition but many occurring in different domains - political,
economic, and social - and the temporality of these processes are
often asynchronous and their articulation seldom harmonious. liS
Despite initial concerns expressed by many students of East
European politics and the tragic experiences of the former
Yugoslavia, all East Central European states have working
democracies and a solid record of political liberties and human
rights protection.
6
These newly democratized regimes do not face
any immediate threats of reversal to authoritarian rule. Slovakia
is the only country which prompted serious concerns about political
rights and liberties. At the same time, the progress of political
and economic transformations has been uneven and their chances of
"full" democratic consolidation are still unclear. Consequently,
the study of various aspects and limits of democratic consolidation
in postcommunist states has emerged as one of the most intriguing
and challenging areas of comparative politics.
Underpinnings of the Transition in Poland: The Shadow of the
Roundtable Agreement, Studies in Comparative communism (1991) 24,
2, 173-90; David Stark and Laszlo Bruszt, Postsocialist Pathways:
Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe,
forthcoming in Cambridge University Press, especially chapter 1.
SDavid Stark, "Path Dependence and Privatization Strategies
in East Central Europe,lI East European Politics and Societies 6,
1 (1992),18.
6In the recent edition of the Freedom House survey "Freedom
in the World 1994-1995" all Central European countries were
declared to be free and scored high both on political rights and
civil liberties measures.
3
This paper seeks to explore the question of democratic
consolidation from a specific analytical and empirical angle. We
will present selected results of our research project on collective
protest in post-1989 East Central Europe. Systematic data
collection from Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the former East
Germany reveals striking contrasts in the magnitude and forms of
protests. Different groups and different organizations were
challenging the policies of the new democratic regimes and
different forms of contentious action became prominent in the
repertoires of contention emerging in these countries. These
differences in popular responses to political and economic
transformations challenge many initial expectations concerning the
nature of postcommunist politics and generate new questions.
First all countries have been undergoing a difficult economic I
adjustment and structural changes that engendered major
dislocations and exacted considerable social costs. Therefore we
need to ask whether and how the economic policies of the new
regimes were actively contested. Did some countries experience more
protests than others? Does such variation in protest magnitude
depend on the adopted type of transformation strategy, political
and social legacies of the communist rule, the level of social cost
and hardship produced by the reforms, new institutional
architecture of the post-1989 polity, or the organizational
resources and capabilities of various collective actors?
Second, a regime transition is a highly volatile political
.process which leaves wide open opportunities for political
participation and contentious collective action, especially in
countries where state institutions undergo a significant
transformation and repressive political practices are abandoned.
Thus one would expect a high level of political mobilization and
protest activities in such transitory polities. A preliminary
overview of protest politics indicates that the number of protest
events in the four countries under study is not higher and in two
cases is distinctively lower than in consolidated West European
4
democracies.
7
We want to know why.
Third, modes of breakdown of communist regimes had no
noticeable impact on the magnitude of protest: countries which
experienced "pacted transitions" (Poland and Hungary) vary between
themselves as much as countries where "popular upsurge" forced the
removal of the communist elites from power (Slovakia and the former
GDR). We would like to know which factors account for different
magnitudes and specific repertoires of protest.
Fourth, while a high level of protest could have been expected
in Poland, its magnitude in the former GDR is surprising. Poland is
the only country in our sample which had a strong and recent
tradition of political conflicts and protests.
s
Since 1989,
however, the former East Germany has been similarly contentious,
despite the absence of any considerable pre-1989 protest
traditions. What can explain high levels of protest in East
Germany?
Comparative studies of collective protest offer four theories
for understanding and explaining the incidence of contentious
collective action, its forms, and magnitude. Variation in protest
characteristics can be explained by emphasizing: (1) discontents
and grievances that can be translated into protest through
psychological mechanisms of relative deprivation; (2) changes in
the structure of political opportunities and actors' calculated
responses to them; (3) the prior existence of traditions,
repertoires of collective action, and mobilizing collective action
frames; and (4) the availability of resources (material,
organizational, and cultural) as main determinants of protest
activities. We will consider all these factors in analyzing
contentious politics in post-1989 East Central Europe. It should be
noted, however, that these analytical perspectives are not mutually
exclusive since each of them emphasizes a dimension of collective
7See Hanspeter Kriesi at aI, New Social Movements in Western
Europe, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1995.
8See Grzegorz Ekiert, Rebellious Poles: Political Crises and
Popular Protest under State Socialism, 1945-1989," East European
Politics and Societies (1997), 11, 2, pp. 1-42.
5
protest which may be dominant in one set of cases but not another.
9
In addition, it should be noted that many concepts applied here
were developed in the study of stable democratic polities and their
application to countries undergoing rapid political and economic
transformations may lead to analytical distortions.
Our analysis is founded on an assumption that democratic
consolidation is a highly contingent and complex process taking
place in several spheres of the socio-political organization of
society. 10 Developments within each sphere and the relationship
between them produce often confusing outcomes and increase
uncertainty. Moreover, as democratic regimes take different paths
towards consolidation, so too do the degrees of contentious
political participation and stability of their institutional
arrangements vary.
The prevailing modes of studying democratic consolidation tend
to emphasize structural preconditions of consolidation or elite
level politics. Recently, the majority of researchers abandoned
structural approaches and adopted the elite centered perspective.
0' Donnell, Schmitter and their collaborators argued that "elite
pacts" are a crucial element in the successful transition from
authoritarian rule.
11
Similarly, Diamond and Linz claimed that lithe
skills, values, strategies, and choices of political leaders figure
prominently in our explanation of the enormously varied experiences
9For recent overviews of literature on social movements and
collective protest see Doug McAdam, John McCarthy and Mayer Zald,
Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements, Cambridge
University Press 1996; Anthony Oberschall, Social Movements, New
Brunswick: Transaction Books 1993; Sidney Tarrow, Power in
Movement, Cambridge University Press 1994.
10For the elaboration of this point see our "Collective
Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland, 1989-1993," Pew
Papers on Central Eastern European Reform and Regionalism, No.3,
Center of International Studies, Princeton University, 1997.
llGuillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, Transitions
from Authoritarian Rule. Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain
Democracies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1986, pp.
37-9.
6
14
wi th democracy in Latin America. n12 Higley and Gunther contended
that "in independent states with long records of political
instability and authoritarian rule, distinctive elite
transformations, carried out by the elites themselves, constitute
the main and possibly the only route to democratic consolidation. ,,13
This almost exclusive focus on elites creates a theoretical
weakness in the existing studies of regime change and
consolidation. Moreover, a methodological emphasis on rational
choice explanations and on modeling political processes as games
further reinforced the already dominant elite-centered focus of
research on democratic transition. Additionally, the greater
availability of nelite" data favors the elite-centered perspective.
Party programs, public speeches and interviews of leaders, reports
on electoral campaigns, election results, journalistic commentaries
etc., are all easily accessible in the public domain. Such sources
of data enable one to reconstruct the political positions of elite
actors, the bargaining processes taking place among them, and to
trace their compromises, coalitions, and policy choices. By
contrast, data on the political activities of non-elite actors are
not readily available; public opinion polls have been routinely
used as the sole source of empirical knowledge on the politics of
the populace at large.
We also find that the existing literature has accorded more
prominence to certain dimensions of consolidation and neglected
others: the formation of party systems is usually viewed as the
most important element in the stabilization and consolidation of
12Larry Diamond and Juan Linz, Introduction: Politics
Society and Democracy in Latin America, in: Democracy in
Developing Countries: Latin America, edited by Larry Diamond,
Juan Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, Boulder: Lynne Rienner 1989,
p. 14.
13John Higley and Richard Gunther, Elites and Democratic
Consolidation in Latin America and Southern Europe, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. xi.
14See Herbert Kitschelt, "Comparative Historical Research
and Rational Choice Theory: the Case of Transition to Democracy,"
Theory and Society (1993), 22, pp. 413-427.
7
democracy. such view is well expressed by Haggard and Kaufman who
emphasize that lithe capacity to organize stable political rule
whether authoritarian or democratic - in the modern context of
broad social mobilization and complex economic system ultimately
rests on organized systems of accountability, and these in turn
rest on political parties. ,,15 In addition to this emphasis on the
capacity and activities of political parties -- quite prominent in
the studies of South European democratizations - - the works on
Eastern Europe tend to focus on the complex interactions between
economic and political reforms .16 This problem has come to be known
as the "dilemma of simultaneity" or "transitional incompatibility
thesis. ,,17
The preoccupation with (a) elites, (b) party systems, (c) the
relationship between political and economic changes is responsible
for a considerable gap in democratization literature. We know very
little about the activities of non-elite actors and how these
lSStephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman, The Political
Economy of Democratic Transitions, Princeton: Princeton
University Press 1995, p. 370; Geoffrey Pridham, ed. Securing
Democracy: Political Parties and Democratic Consolidation in
Southern Europe, London: Routledge 1990; Juan J. Linz, IIChange
and Continuity in the Nature of Contemporary Democracies, II in:
Reexamining Democracy, pp. 182-207; Herbert Kitschelt, "The
Formation of Party Systems in East Central Europe, II Politics and
Society (1992), 20, I, pp. 7-50.
16See, for example, Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the
Market, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; Grzegorz
Ekiert, "Prospects and Dilemmas of the Transition to a Market
Economy in East Central Europe, II in: Research on Democracy and
Society (1993), I, pp. 51-82; Luiz Carlos Bresser Pereira, Jose
Maria Maravall and Adam Przeworski, Economic Reforms in New
Democracies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993.
17See Claus Offe, IICapitalism by Democratic Design?
Democratic Theory Facing the Triple Transition in East Central
Europe," Social Research (1991), 58, 4, pp. 865-92; Piotr
Sztompka, IIDilemmas of the Great Transition: A Tentative
Catalogue," Program on Central and Eastern Europe Working Paper
Series, No. 19, Center for European Studies, Harvard University,
1992; Leslie Armijo, Thomas Biersteker and Abraham Lowenthal,
liThe Problems of Simultaneous Transitions," Journal of Democracy
(1994), 5, 4, pp. 161-75.
8
activi ties shape the processes of democratization. Some students of
democratic transitions have begun, however, studying the importance
of the "resurrection of civil society" and its political role both
during the decomposition of authoritarian rule and in its
aftermath. 18 It is often noted, for example, that the greatest
challenge to the policies of the newly democratized states may come
from various organizations of civil society (labor unions, interest
groups, etc). 19 Yet the development of such organizations and their
political role is not systematically documented and analyzed. We
also agree with Neidhardt and Rucht, who conclude "that social
movement research should concentrate more on the interactions of
movements with other agents. "20
18For the most recent examples of this growing interest in
the role of civil society in democratization see Sidney Tarrow,
"Mass Mobilization and Regime Change: Pacts, Reform, and Popular
Power in Italy (1918-1922) and Spain (1975-1978), in Richard
Gunter, Nikiforos Diamandouros, and Hans-Jurgen Puhle, eds.,
Politics of Democratic Consolidation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press 1995, pp. 204-230; Victor Perez-Diaz, The Return
of Civil Society, Harvard University Press 1993; Nancy Bermeo,
"Myths of Moderation: The Parameters of Civility During
Democratization," unpublished manuscript, Princeton University;
Philippe Schmitter, "Some Propositions about Civil Society and
the Consolidation of Democracy," unpublished manuscript, Stanford
University; Stephen Fish, Democracy form Scratch. Opposition and
Regime in the New Russian Revolution, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1995; Philip D. Oxhorn, Organizing Civil
Society. The Popular Sectors and the Struggle for Democracy in
. Chile, University Park: The pennsylvania State University Press,
1995.
19Charles Tilly in his studies of collective action in
France and Britain convincingly demonstrates that over the last
two centuries, organizations of civil society were the typical
vehicles of protest. See Charles Tilly, Louise Tilly and Richard
Tilly, The Rebellious Century, 1830-1930, Cambridge: Harvard
University Press 1975; Charles Tilly, The Contentious French,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1986; Charles Tilly,
Repertoires of Contention in America and Britain 1750-1830, in:
The Dynamic of Social Movements, edited by M. Zald and J.D.
McCarthy, Cambridge: Winthrop 1979. This regularity is confirmed
by all systematic studies of protest in contemporary societies.
20See FriedheIm Neidhardt and Dieter Rucht, "The Analysis of
Social Movements: The State of the Art and Some Perspectives for
9
The study of citizens' participation in democratic
consolidations has often been reduced to an examination of
political attitudes, conducted on representative samples of the
population. "The third wave
ll
of democratizations allows, often for
the first time in the history of a given society, for the
administration of unconstrained public opinion polls.
Understandably, many scholars capitalized on this opportunity and
studied public attitudes and their changes during the transition
21
process. Such studies contribute to our knowledge of public
reactions to regime change and are very useful as long as the
results of public opinion polls are not accepted as a substitute
for data on actual political behavior. As Tarrow emphasizes,
"unless we trace the forms of activity people use, how these
reflect their demands, and their interaction with opponents and
elites, we cannot understand either the magnitude or the dynamics
of change in politics and society. 1122
Our research project was based on the assumption that event
analysis and, in particular, the systematic collection of data on
collective action from newspapers, can shed new light on the
political behavior of non-elite actors during democratization.
Following the pioneering work of Charles Tilly and his associates,
event analysis has become an accepted and often an indispensable
Further Research," in Research on Social Movements. The State of
the Art in Western Europe and the USA, Dieter Rucht, ed.,
Frankfurt am Main and Boulder: Campus Verlag and Westview Press,
1991, p. 459.
21See, for example, impressive series of Studies in Public
Policy, produced by the Center for the Study of Public Policy,
University of Strathclyde and coordinated by Richard Rose; Peter
McDonough, Samuel H. Barnes and A. Lopez Pina, "The Growth of
Democratic Legitimacy in Spain," American Political Science
Review (1986), 80, 3, pp. 735-60; Krzysztof Zagorski," Hope
Factor, Inequality, and Legitimacy of Systemic Transformations:
The Case of Poland, II Communist and Post-Communist Studies (1994),
27, 4, pp. 357-376.
22Sidney Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder. Protest and
Politics in Italy 1965-1975. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1989, pp.
7-8. See also his "Mass Mobilization and Regime Change, II in The
Politics of Democratic Consolidation, pp. 204-230.
10
research method in the study of collective action, protest and
social movements. Despite its imperfections and limitations,
acknowledged by those who use it, the event analysis is uniquely
capable of providing researchers with the most extensive and
systematic sets of data on protest activities and their different
components and dimensions. It allows to study both the qualitative
and quantitative aspects of protest actions over time and in large
geographical areas. It may be used in various projects, ranging
from a single case study to multi-state comparative works. It can
be applied to answer a variety of questions concerning collective
action, its forms and outcomes, its organizers and participants,
responses of the state and broader political issues. Data sets
constructed on the basis of specifically selected press sources
provide information on protest events for extended periods of
time.
23
II. Incidence and Magnitude of Collective Protest in Post-1989 East
Central Europe.
In our research project we sought to construct a detailed data
base of all forms and incidents of collective protest in Hungary,
Poland, Slovakia, and the former East Germany. We adopted a broad
definition of protest event to cover all types of non-institutional
and unconventional political actions and used identical coding
23For the review of methodological issues and various
applications of the protest event analysis see Roberto Franzosi,
"The Press as a Source of Socio-historical Data: Issues in the
Methodology of Data Collection from Newspapers," in: Historical
Methods, 1987, 20, pp.5-16; Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in
Great Britain 1758-1834. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1995, pp. 55-105; Dieter Rucht and Thomas Ohlemacher, "Protest
Event Data: Collection, Uses and Perspectives," in: Studying
Collective Action, edited by Mario Diani and Ron Eyerman, London:
SAGE, 1992, pp. 76-106; Susan Olzak, "Analysis of Events in the
Study of Collective Action," Annual Review of Sociology, 1989,
15, pp.119-41; Dieter Rucht, Ruud Koopmans, and FriedheIm
Neidhardt, eds., Protest Event Analysis: Methodological
Perspectives and Empirical Results, forthcoming.
II
protocols in the four countries we study. 24 Our research teams
collected information only on IIpublic
ll
protest events, that is
actions which were reported in at least one newspaper included in
our sample. They systematically scanned two daily newspapers and
four weeklies in each country for the entire period under study and
recorded all available information concerning reported protest
actions. The number of protest events recorded in each country is
presented in the following table:
Table 1: Protest events in. Hungary, Poland, Slovakia
and the former East Germany 1989-1993.
The table reveals striking differences in the number of protest
events which occurred in these countries. Poland and the former GDR
had a high number of protest events during the analyzed period with
relatively small differences between years. Hungary and Slovakia
had much lower incidence of protests. This situation calls for a
close examination, given the fact that all countries have been
undergoing a turbulent political transformation and implemented
comprehensive economic adjustment programs involving a substantial
level of disruption and social cost. In Slovakia, the low number of
protest activities and the predominance of non-disruptive methods ,
such as protest letters, is especially surprising. One may expect
that a country breaking from a long lasting federation and building
an independent statehood would experience a high level of popular
mobilization.
The numbers presented in the Table 1 are not weighted by the
size of the population. It might be assumed that the larger a
24We define the protest event as collective action of at
least three people, who set out to articulate specific demands.
Our database includes also extreme I politically motivated acts
such as self-immolation, hunger strikes I or acts of terror
carried out by individuals. In order to qualify as a protest
event I such action can not be the routine or legally prescribed
behavior of a social or political organization. Strikes, rallies
or demonstrations I 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 Susan Olzak, IIAnalysis of Events, II pp. 124-27.
12
country's population, the more protest events it will experience.
This, of course, may not always be the case but one will never know
unless some measure of protest magnitude is constructed and
"weighted" by the size of the country's population. Given our
definition of protest event, the set of protest events our coders
recorded included both small, brief street gatherings and several
month-long strike campaigns. Hence, in order to grasp the magnitude
of protest in a given unit of time we had to construct a synthetic
index of magnitude. Inspired by Tilly's idea to gauge
simultaneously several dimensions of protest, we attempted to
construct such an index, by multiplying three variables of our data
25
protocol: (a) duration, (b) number of participants, and (c) scope.
Unfortunately "number of participants" proved to be the variable
with the highest frequency of missing values. 26 Two attempts to
estimate missing values, relying on different assumptions, produced
very different results, thus the validity of our composite index of
magnitude proved to be dubious. We settled for a simpler index,
based on the "duration" variable alone for which we have an almost
perfect record.
27
This index was composed in the following way: The
duration of each protest event was expressed as the number of 24
hour periods it was composed of. For example, a seven day strike
was ascribed a value of 7 protest-days. Next we summarized the
values of this new variable for all protest events in a given
25Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution, New York:
McGraw-Hill 1978, pp. 162-4.
26There are more than fifty percent of missing values in our
Polish, Slovak, and Hungarian databases for several calendar
years.
27Validity refers to IImeasuring what we think we are
measuring." (Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba,
Designing Social Inquiry, Princeton: Princeton University Press
1994, p. 25). The validity of a synthetic construct or category
can be improved by (a) increasing the number of independent
measures it is based on and (b) finding such measures which
strongly correlate with each other (see Robert Philip Weber,
Basic Content Analysis, Newbury Park: Sage 1990, pp. 18-21).
Since our index of magnitude is based on only one measure
(duration) its validity is weak. But we traded validity for high
reliability_
13
calendar year. That gave us an approximation of the protest
magnitude for each year in all four countries. Additionally, we
calculated means of protest magnitude for each country for the
entire period under study. This number was then divided by the
number of adults (15-64) in order to arrive at the weighted index
of maqnitude for each country. The results of these calculations
are reported in Table 2 and illustrated in Graphs 1 through 4.
Table 2: General measures of protest activities in the
four countries.
Graphs 1-4: Magnitudes of Protest
As Graphs 1 through 4 clearly demonstrate each country had its own
specific dynamic of protest during the period studied.
28
In Poland,
the magnitude of protest decreased in 1990, but then increased
every year after. This increasing magnitude of protest in Poland is
the most unexpected finding of our study. 29 We assumed that the
regime transition, transfer of political power, and the
introduction of dramatic economic reforms would produce a higher
level of popular mobilization and contentious politics at the
beginning of the analyzed period. In Hungary, the magnitude of
protest was highest in 1989, declined in the following two years
and increased again in the end of the analyzed period. In Slovakia
protest was intensifying until 1992 and declined afterwards. In the
former East Germany the magnitude of protest peaked in 1992 and
declined in 1993.
The order of weighted indexes of magnitude produces a somewhat
surprising ranking of the four countries. Poland turns out to be
280ne 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.
29This phenomenon is analyzed in Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan
Kubik The Rebellious Civil Society: Popular Protest and
Democratic Consolidation in Poland, unpublished manuscript under
review.
14
most contentious state during the early phase of democratic
consolidation, which -- given Poland's traditions of contentious
politics -- is not a surprise. But Slovakia's second place ranking
is. This country did not have as much protest as its other states,
but on the "per capita" basis its population proved to be quite
contentious. The biggest surprise is Hungary coming in last. We
expected that Hungarians, who by all accounts are more dissatisfied
with the post-1989 changes than are Poles or East Germans, would be
more contentious. In the fourth section we offer several
explanations for both the differential patterns of protest dynamic
and each country's standing in our "protest ranking."
III. Selected Characteristics of Protest Politics.
The countries analyzed in this paper differ not only in terms
of incidence and magnitude of protest. There were interesting
variations among other protest characteristics as well. The general
repertoire of contention was similar in all countries and closely
mirrored standard strategies used by protesting groups in
contemporary politics. Protest actions in Poland, Hungary and
Slovakia were decidedly non-violent. In Poland, disruptive
strategies such as street demonstrations and strikes were most
common but in Hungary and Slovakia nearly 70 percent of the
strategies used by protesting groups were of a non-disruptive
character. In contrast to these three countries, the number of
violent protests in the former GDR was significantly higher and
disruptive strategies dominated the repertoire of collective
action.
Table 3: General Protest Strategies in East Central Europe
Our database did not record any important shifts in protest
strategies used by challenging groups. Dominant types of strategies
were consistent throughout the entire period under study. Nor did
we register any significant innovations in protest activities which
were latter diffused from one category of protestors to another or
among various groups and organizations. Thus the repertoires of
15
contention in each country were not significantly diverse and
relatively stable over time. This stability of repertoires may
indicate that East Central European countries did not experience a
cycle of protest which according to Tarrow is characterized among
other things by expanding repertoires of contention.
30
Although the general strategies of protest (violent,
disruptive, and non-violent) did not vary significantly from
country to country, specific forms of protest dominated protest
repertoire of the challenging groups in each country. In all four
countries, disruptive strategies including demonstrations, marches
and street blockades were frequently used by protesting groups and
were most common in the former East Germany. In Poland strikes (the
number of strikes was three times higher than in any other country)
and strike alerts were used regularly. If we combine strikes and
strike alerts, this form of protest comprises 36.4 percent, that is
the majority among protest strategies in the Polish repertoire.
The number of strikes was similar and significantly smaller in
other three countries. In Hungary and Slovakia protest letters and
statements were the most frequent strategy used to express
grievances and convey demands. The most frequently used strategies
recorded in our database are presented in Table 4.
Table 4: Specific protest strategies in East Central Europe
Not all social groups and categories were active in
contentious politics; those who seem to have been hardest hit by
the market reforms were often absent from the protest scene. In
this respect, it is interesting to note that relatively few protest
actions were organized by marginalized social groups (homeless,
unemployed) or minorities. It was the mainstream social and
professional groups who were most often involved in protest
actions. In Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia public sector employees
(excluding workers in state-owned enterprises) comprised the most
30Sidney Tarrow, "Cycles of Collective Action: Between
Moments of Madness and the Repertoire of Contention, II in:
Repertoires and Cycles of Collective Action, edited by Mark
Traugott, Durham: Duke University Press 1995, pp. 89-115.
16
protest prone social category. In Poland workers and farmers were
more prominent in protest activities than in the other three
countries. Youth was more frequently involved in protest actions in
the former GDR and Poland than in the other two countries. This
finding, however, has to be carefully interpreted; we were unable
to determine the category of participants in the majority of
demonstrations, because we have a substantial amount of missing
data regarding the social and professional profile of protestors.
This amount is lower for Poland because it is easier to identify
participants in a strike, which were the dominant strategy in that
country. The data on socio-vocational categories of protest
participants are presented in Table 5:
Table 5: Socio-vocational category of participants
Our data regarding protest organizers are more reliable. We
falsified our initial hypothesis that during the early stages of
regime transition the incidence of spontaneous protests is going to
be high. Protest events in all countries were usually organized by
existing, well established organizations. Each country's protest
politics was dominated by a different set of organizations, but the
range of organizations sponsoring protest actions was similar to
those sponsoring protest activities in other European countries.
They included labor movements, political parties, interests groups,
and social movements. The only contrast with West European
experiences was the much smaller role of social movements in
sponsoring protest activities and the relatively larger role of
traditional organizations such as political parties, trade unions
or professional groups.31 In Poland trade unions were most active
in organizing protest activities. In Hungary and Slovakia political
parties were the most frequent organizers of protests. In the
former East Germany social movements were dominant, political
31Kriesi, Koopmans, Duyvendak and Giugni in their analysis
of four West European countries determined that new social
movements organized 36.1% of protests in France, 73.2% in
Germany, 65.4% in Netherlands, and 61.0% in Switzerland (see New
Social Movements in Western Europe, p. 20).
17
parties followed. The data on protest organizers are presented in
Table 6.
Table 6: Organizations sponsoring or leading protest actions
Initially, we expected that the demands put forward by the
protesting groups would be primarily concerned with political
issues. We accepted the notion common in the literature on East
European transitions that in the wake of state socialism's collapse
people are confused about their real economic interests. Yet our
data show that politically contentious regime transitions and the
establishment of democracy after decades of authoritarian rule did
not create a highly politicized environment characterized by the
predominance of symbolic politics. The demands pressed by
protesting groups were predominantly concrete, reflected "everyday"
economic concerns, and when they were political, their tenor was
mainly reformist. Anti-systemic proclamations were rare. Thus in
the language of contention one can find evidence of a broad support
for democracy and market economy.
The way demands in all four countries cluster reflects the
concerns of the dominant organizers. In Poland, where trade unions
played the most active role in organizing protest, economic demands
were predominant, while in Hungary and Slovakia political parties
organized more protests than other groups and political demands
were most common. In the former East Germany political demands only
slightly outnumbered economic demands. The data on types of demands
are presented in Table 7.
Table 7: Types of demands
Despite the variation in protest strategies, demands, and protest
sponsoring organizations, protest actions were uniformly directed
at the state and demands were addressed to state authorities. There
was an evident similarity in the targets of protest actions in all
countries. (Targets are understood to be the authorities to which
the demands were addressed and who were expected to respond to
them.) The governments, followed by parliaments and other national
18
level state agencies, were by far the most frequent targets of
protest actions. Only in the former East Germany do we see a
significant number of demands addressed to local and regional
authorities due to the federal structure of the state. A
surprisingly low number of demands were addressed to the management
of enterprises and domestic or foreign owners. It seems that
regardless of the issue at stake, protesting groups look to the
state and central authorities for solutions. The following table
presents the distribution of targets of protest in all countries.
Table 8: Targets of protest
In sum, even a cursory look at various features of protest
actions, presented in this section, reveals considerable contrasts
and unexpected similarities among the four post-communist
countries. Such variations in magnitude, scope, and forms of
protest actions as well as in types of protest organizers and
groups prone to participate in collective action, raise a number of
interesting questions. In order to account for such differences we
will briefly examine several possible explanatory leads, derived
from the arsenal of available theories of social protest. Being
constrained by the format of this paper we will offer only four
explanatory sketches, suggested by the following set of theories:
1. relative deprivation, which links variation in protest
activities to the changing perceptions and assessments of
people's (particularly economic) situation;
2. "instrumental" institutionalism, founded on the concept of
political opportunity structure, which focuses on
institutional constraints and opportunities, available to
protestors, including those which are linked to the
transformation processes taking place in the region;
3. historical-cultural institutionalism, which emphasizes
interactions between institutionalization and cultural
learning and turns our attention toward historically shaped
"traditions
ll
of contentious action;
4. resource mobilization theory, which emphasizes resources
available to challenging groups.
19
An examination of the IIfitll between these theories and our data
should allow us to determine which factors are primarily
responsible for people's protest behavior. This, in turn, should
shed new light on the politics of postcommunist consolidation.
IV. Explaining the patterns of protest politics in East Central
Europe.
Conventional wisdom among observers of East Central European
transformations holds that building new democratic state
institutions could be accomplished with relative ease. Also, the
introduction of competitive elections and the formation of party
systems was seen as a more or less uncomplicated task. The re
creation of civil society, however, was predicted to be a lengthy
and difficult process, spanning a generation or two. 32 We argue that
these claims should be revised. During the first five years of
consolidation, the rebirth and/or expansion of civil society
occurred with unexpected speed and intensity in every country. The
state, however, was not so much reformed, as weakened. The
development of political society was often slow, tedious, and
unpredictable. Moreover, these processes have differed from country
to country. The former East Germany experienced the swift
establishment of a new political and legal framework as a result of
the unification, and the new state administration has been stronger
and more efficient than in any other post-communist regime.
However, it can be argued that it is still weaker than in the
Western part of Germany. Similarly, the party system crystallized
and stabilized much faster, with the West German parties extending
their organizational reach to the five new Lander. In the other
three countries the states and party systems have been in flux,
with Hungary having the most success in developing a relatively
stable and clearly articulated party system.
33
32See Ralf Dahrendorf, Reflection on the Revolution in
Europe, New York: Random House 1990.
33See Herbert Kitschelt, liThe Formation of Party Systems in
East Central Europe, II and IIFormation of Party Cleavages in Post
20
The four countries included in the project represent distinct
types of post-communist transformations and have experienced
contrasting political and economic developments since 1989. The
major differences among them stern from (1) the type and sequence of
economic policies and (2) the nature and extent of the state
transformation. These differences can be summarized in the
following table:
Table 9: Economic transformations and the state continuity
in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the former East Germany
continuity discontinuity
rapid Poland former GDR
gradual Hungary Slovakia
The first dimension represents the extent of changes experienced by
the bureaucratic structures of the post-communist state. In all
countries a classical party- state was rapidly dismantled. The
dominant role of the communist party was eliminated, supreme state
institutions re-designed, constitutions amended, parliaments and
governments were given supreme authority and re-established under
democratic control. The office of president, albeit with different
prerogatives, was created in all countries. Other existing state
agencies were reformed to a different degree and new were
incorporated in the state institutional design.
In Poland and Hungary there has been a notable continuity in
the institutional organization and personnel of the state both in
the civilian and military sectors. Almost all state institutions
inherited from the old regime survived and secured their place in
the new institutional framework of the state. This continuity is a
result of two factors: first, in the final years of the communist
rule these countries introduced a number of institutional reforms
compatible with the requirements of a market economy and democracYi
communist Democracies: Theoretical Propositions," Party Politics
(1995), 1, 4, pp. 447-472.
21
second, both countries exited state socialism on the basis of
intra-elite negotiations and pacts which assured a significant
degree of continuity of state institutions. In contrast to these
two countries, the former GDR and Slovakia experienced a more
profound change in the state organization. In October 1990, the
German Democratic Republic was unified with West Germany and the
five new Lander were incorporated into the federal framework of the
West German Republic. At the same time, all institutions of the
former East German state were thoroughly dismantled and their
employees screened and purged. Slovakia became an independent state
on January 1, 1993, following failed efforts to renegotiate the
Czechoslovak federation. Many institutions of the Slovak Republic
existing under the federal arrangement of the Czechoslovak state
simply became Slovak national institutions; however, new segments
of the state administration had to be organized almost from
scratch. Moreover, the rapid and contentious departure from state
socialism in these countries contributed to institutional
discontinuity with the old regime.
Newly emerged democratic states inherited different economic
legacies and pursued contrasting economic policies. The former East
Germany and Poland experienced rapid and radical economic
transformations. The Balcerowicz Plan introduced in January 1990 in
response to dramatic deterioration of the Polish economy and the
threat of hyperinflation imposed harsh macro-economic stabilization
measures. This adjustment program instantly re-shaped Poland's
economic system, arrested an escalating economic crisis, and
imposed new, market-friendly rules. It opened the way for
comprehensive structural economic reforms combined with
privatization and welfare reforms.
34
In the former East Germany the
economic transformation was designed to unify economic
institutions, fiscal and monetary policies, and economic conditions
between two parts of the country. The change affected the entire
34See Jeffrey Sachs, Poland's Jump to the Market Economy,
Cambridge: MIT Press 1993j Ben Slay, The Polish Economy. Crisis,
Reform, and Transformation, Princeton: Princeton University Press
1994 and Kazimierz Poznanski, Poland's Protracted Transition,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996.
22
institutional structure of the economy. Stabilization policies were
combined with structural reforms, comprehensive privatization, and
a thorough transformation of welfare institutions. The dismantling
of all legacies of state socialism was faster and more radical than
in any other post-communist country. It included the massive and
swift privatization of all economic assets previously controlled by
the communist state. This ~ m m e n s e institutional change was
cushioned by an unprecedented transfer of capital, bureaucratic
know-how, and assistance from the West to the East. In contrast to
Poland and East Germany, Hungary and Slovakia have chosen a more
gradual pace for economic transformations both in terms of macro
economic and privatization policies.
This analysis does not reveal any clear patterns. There is no
correlation between the nature of power transfer and the type of
economic reforms on the one hand and the protest magnitude on the
other. However, if one puts aside Slovakia and former East Germany,
two countries where a significant amount of protest resulted from
the dramatic redefinition of the polity, and focuses on Poland and
Hungary, one may conclude that the factor which seems to explain
the varied magnitude of collective protest is the type and
sequencing of economic reforms introduced by the post-communist
regimes: rapid reforms result in more protests than do gradual
reforms. It is customary to build such an argument on the logic of
some "deprivation theory, II according to which rapid reforms
produced higher social cost and are perceived with more hostility
among the popUlation. This, in turn, leads to the heightened
incidence of protest. As we will demonstrate in the next section,
neither link in this reasoning is confirmed by our empirical data.
4.1. Protest as an expression of deprivation or grievances.
The relationship between rapid economic or political reforms
and the populace's (dis) satisfaction or deprivation is usually
theorized with the help of some simplified version of the relative
deprivation theory. It is impossible to summarize the classical
variant of this theory, proposed for example by Ted Gurr in his
classic Why Men Rebel i it is a non-parsimonious and intricate
23
theoretical system, founded on the concept of "relative
deprivation. ,,35 However, the main thrust of the argument - at least
in its most popular and influential version -- is simple and
easily falsifiable. In general, various relative deprivation
approaches assume that:
an increase in extent or intensity of grievances or
deprivation and the development of ideology occur prior to the
emergence of social movement phenomena. Each of these
perspectives holds that discontent produced by some
combination of structural conditions is a necessary if not
sufficient condition to an account of the rise of specific
social movement (or protest - G.E. & J.K.) phenomenon
36
In this rendition of the theory, proposed by McCarthy and Zald, the
concept of "deprivation" replaces IIrelative deprivation," which
considerably changes the nature of the argument. Yet we will follow
this common practice, mostly because we do not know of any
comparative study of relative deprivation in the four East Central
European states, while we found several comparative studies dealing
with various aspects (indicators) of political and economic
"deprivation" or "intensity of grievances."
We will test a simple hypothesis: the higher the level of
discontent with the post-1989 economic and political changes or the
higher the intensity of grievances or the sense of deprivation, the
higher the magnitude of protest. In order to test this hypothesis
we will rank the four countries according to the results of several
.comparative studies which measured various aspect of people's
35Relative deprivation is Ita 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." Ted
Gurr, Why Men Rebel, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1970,
p. 13.
36John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, "Resource Mobilization
and Social Movements: A Partial Theory," in Social Movements in
an Organizational Society, New Brunswick: Transaction 1978, p.
17.
24
discontent and compare the results of such rankings with the
ranking based on the magnitude of protest.
The studies we have chosen for this exercise were conducted in
at least three countries we are interested in during the 1989-1993
period. The surveys asked the same set of question in all
countries, producing thereby comparable results. These studies
include:
a. New Democracies Barometer IV: A la-Nation Survey;37
b. Mason's study on attitudes towards the market and the state
in postcommunist Europe; 38
c. Kornai's calculations of the decline of real wages in East
Central Europe; 39
d. calculations of Gini coefficients;40
e. calculations of the ratios of top ten percent to bottom ten
percent of wage earners (decile ratios) ;41
f. Ferge's study on the satisfaction with the post-1989
37Richard Rose and Christian Haerpfer, "Change and Stability
in the New Democracies Barometer. A Trend Analysis," Center for
the Study of Public Policy, Glasgow: University of Strathclyde,
1996.
38David Mason, "Attitudes Towards the Market and the State
in Postcommunist Europe," paper presented at the 1992 Annual
Meeting of APSA, Chicago, Ill., p.14.
39Janos Kornai, "Paying Bill for Goulash-Communism." The
figure for 1990 refers only to the category of workers and
employees, excluding workers in agricultural cooperatives; since
1991, the data include these.
4World Development Report: From Plan to Market, New York:
Oxford University Press 1996, p. 69 and Michael Wyzan, "Increased
Inequality, Poverty Accompany Economic Transition," Transition, 4
October 1996, pp. 24-27.
41Jan Rutkowski, "Becoming Less Equal: Wage Effects of
Economic Transition in Poland," Pew Papers on Central Eastern
European Reform and Regionalism, Center for International
Studies, Princeton University, 1996 and Zsusa Ferge, liThe
Evaluation of Freedom, Security, and Regime Change," paper
prepared for the Euroconference on Social Policy, organized by
ICCR-Vienna, Lisbon, November, 8-11, 1995.
25
reforms.
42
Table 10: Selected Rankings of Central European States
43
Table 10 presents the results of our analyses. The hypothesis is
not confirmed: Hungarians are clearly most dissatisfied with the
post-1989 changes, and yet the magnitude of protest in this country
is lower than elsewhere. The contrast with Poland is particularly
striking; even if we assume that Poles and Hungarians are equally
dissatisfied, the IIdeprivation hypothesis
ll
fails, for Poland has a
higher magnitude of protest. Another "anomaly" from the point of
view of the regularity suggested by our hypothesis emerges from a
comparison of Hungary with former East Germany. The situation in
the latter country is dramatically different from other
postcommunist states, given the financial transfers between the
Western and Eastern areas of the country and the efforts of the
German government to equalize their standards of living. As a
result of this massive assistance, the economy of the five new
German Lander has grown between 7 and 10 percent a year since 1992
and as Kopstein points out "purely in terms of living standards,
East Germans are the clear winners of communism's collapse. ,,44 And
yet East Germans engage in protest activities with a higher
42Zsusa Ferge, ibid.
43For columns (2) and (3) the numbers were obtained by
subtracting the percentage of the respondents who approved of the
regime in Winter 1993/94 (New Democracies Barometer III) from the
percentage of those who approved the regime in Fall 1991 (NDB-I).
It should be also emphasized that Poles disapproved of the
communist regime and the socialist economic system much more
decisively than either the Slovaks or the Hungarians. For the
mean ranking (Column 9) we used Ferge's P90/P10 index (7"); it is
more IIhostile" to our hypothesis than Rutkowski's index (7').
Column (11) is based on Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew M. Warner,
"Achieving Rapid Growth in the Transition Economies of Central
Europe," Development Discussion Papers, Harvard Institute for
International Development, No. 544 (July 1996) .
44Jeffrey Kopstein, nWeak Foundations Under East German
Reconstruction," Transition 26 January 1996, p.64.
26
frequency and more zeal than Hungarians, who are far less satisfied
with the result of communism's collapse.
Graph 5-8: Approval of current political and economic systems
45
A comparison of the pattern of changes during the studied
period produces mixed results. As Graphs 5 to 8 illustrate, the
Slovak and Hungarian data conform to the predictions of the
IIdeprivation theory: II the fluctuations of protest magnitude in
these countries are correlated with the fluctuations in people's
approval of economic and political systems. However, the theory
fails dismally when it is applied to Poland. As the people's
approval of the political and economic systems increases
systematically, so does the magnitude of protest!!!
Given the data reported in Table la, it is possible to falsify
our "deprivation hypothesis" in many different ways. For example,
given the data in column (5) (Kornai's estimates of the real wages
decline) this hypothesis would predict that Poland and Slovakia
should have the same magnitude of strikes which would be higher
than in Hungary, whose wage earners experienced a much smaller
decline in their incomes. Also, Polish and Slovak protestors should
put forth economic demands (higher wages) with greater frequency
than their Hungarian counterparts. The first expectation is not
confirmed by the data presented in tables 2 and 4: Poles organized
far more strikes than either Hungarians or Slovaks. The second
expectation fails in the light of data presented in table 7: Poles
concentrated their demands on economic issues far more often than
did the Hungarians -- as expected -- but also more often than the
Slovaks.
One could of course argue that Poles - on the one hand, and
Hungarians and Slovaks - on the other, expressed their economic
deprivation through different idioms and organizational strategies.
But this is precisely the kind of argument that the lldeprivation
approach11 is ill-equipped to field. Changes in magnitude,
45Richard Rose and Christian Haerpfer, op. cit., pp. 23-27
and 45 49.
27
strategies, mobilizational efficacy, success, etc. of protest do
not reflect the fluctuations in people's sense of deprivation
(dissatisfaction). Neither do they follow the changes in the so
called objective economic indicators, as clearly evidenced by the
comparison of data reported in columns (1), (10), and (11) of Table
10. According to Sachs' and Warner's analysis, Poland, Hungary, and
Slovakia have almost identical scores on the composite Reform
Index; moreover their scores are the highest in the whole
postcommunist world. Yet the patterns of protest activities in
these three countries were widely divergent. Finally, it should be
emphasized that the country where the accumulative decline of GDP
during the 1989-93 period was the smallest and which was first in
overcoming the "transitory recession," that is Poland
experienced the highest and intensifying magnitude of protest.
Our "deprivation hypothesis, II suggested by a popular
interpretation of relative deprivation theory, is not confirmed. In
order to explain fluctuating magnitudes and patterns of protest in
the four countries we must turn elsewhere.
4.2. Institutional explanations.
To comprehend the variations in collective actor's responses
to economic and political reforms, we have to examine East Central
European transformations as combinations of complex developments
taking place in several distinct institutional domains. We pose a
hypothesis that the many differences in the magnitude and
characteristics of protest actions in the four countries under
study are related both to the institutional legacies of state
socialism and the post-1989 processes of the reconstitution and
institutionalization of democratic politics. But before we attempt
to explain the more subtle differences among the dimensions of
contentious politics, we will comment on the overall differences in
the magnitude of protest among these countries.
If opportunities for collective action afforded by the state
are one of the most critical variable in explaining the incidence
28
and magnitude of collective protest,46 transitory polities where all
stable characteristics of the political opportunity structure are
in flux should have been an arena of constant collective struggles.
Since they are not, and the magnitude of protest varies from state
to state, the concept of political opportunity structure has to be
carefully reconsidered for application to cases of regime change.
47
We argue that there is a need to distinguish between the
structure of political opportunity (characteristic for stable
polities) and unstructured opportunity (a feature of transitory,
II open" polities) .48 A change in some partial opportunity structures
or a partial alteration of some dimensions of the opportunity
structure in stable countries will be immediately treated as an
incentive to act by all those collective actors who have been
prepared to press their claims against the state. Such a change
will signal to the groups or organizations with resources,
established agendas, and long-held claims that now is the time to
act. When these groups or organization are successful in pressing
their demands other may follow, expanding the range of issues and
institutional arenas of contentious politics. 49 Thus one could argue
46See, for example I Hanspeter Kriesi, liThe Political
Opportunity Structure of New Social Movements: Its Impact on
Their Mobilization," in J. Craig Jenkins and Bert Klandermans,
eds., The Politics of Social Protest. Comparative Perspectives
on States and Social Movements, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1995.
47There is an argument to be made that the structure of
political opportunity is multidimensional. There are different
opportunity structures for actors differently situated within a
given socia-political system (Kriesi, op cit.). Thus the change
in one dimension of the opportunity structure may affect some but
not all real or potential collective actors. We do not develop
this thought here.
48l1The most salient changes in opportunity structure are
four: the opening up of access to participation, shifts in ruling
alignments, the availability of influential allies, and cleavages
within and among elites," Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement, p.
86.
49See debates on cycles of protest and especially Doug
McAdam, "'Initiator' and 'Spin-off' Movements: Diffusion
29
that in stable and gradually changing polities, alterations of the
political opportunity structures provide incentives for contentious
action.
By contrast, in countries undergoing rapid political and
economic transition, the four elements of the political opportunity
structure specified by Tarrow are wide open and unconstrained. Such
a situation may have either demobilizing effects or simply
encourage mobilization without limits. For organized collective
actors issues which were important in the past may not be relevant
any more, new issue-arenas may become unclear or not yet
established, their attention is drawn toward general issues which
are not easily translated into paradigms of collective action they
had learned earlier. Moreover, agendas for contentious politics in
more stable polities are built on the assumption that it is
relatively clear who is the friend and who is the adversary and who
bears responsibility for specific issues and problems. The
distinction between "them" and IIUS" serves as a guide-post for the
struggle. But in transitory polities this underlying cultural
matrix of enemies and culprits becomes unclear and muddled: former
oppositional activists take over the state apparatus and it is no
longer clear who is "us" and who is IIthem."
such conditions, which we will call unstructured opportunity,
offer protestors considerable freedom of action: there are few
established organizational boundaries that should be abolished;
there are no predefined agendas whose expansion may be demanded;
ruling alignments change often; there are potentially many
available allies; and cleavages "within and among elites" are fluid
and poorly structured. The state manages to protect order within
the public domain, but it offers little resistance to non-violent
protest actions and it seems to ignore protestors. Additionally,
state functionaries do not know how to deal with protestors: formal
and informal procedures through which protestors could become a
Processes in Protest Cycles," in Repertoires and Cycles of
Collective Action, pp. 217-39.
30
part of the policy-making processes are poorly developed.
50
It is
therefore difficult to analyze changing features of protest as
responses to changing opportunities: opportunities simply do not
change much.
In East Central Europe, where such an unchanging and poorly
structured opportunity emerged after 1989, the magnitude of protest
is by and large lower than in more established democracies. We
suspect that this is a result of (a) the demobilizing effect the
lIexcessive" openness of the opportunity structure and (b) weaker
than in Western Europe institutional support structure for protest
activities, including the accessibility of organizational,
material, and symbolic resources.
At the same time, the protest magnitude in all countries
fluctuated although the openness of the system (political
opportunity structure) did not. Also, protest strategies and
demands varied from country to country, although their political
systems seem to have been equally opened. Since neither deprivation
theory nor the features of the opportunity structure explain such
variance I we need to turn to other theories. We observe that
despite of the considerable opening in the political opportunity
structure, collective action is channelled through various "old"
and "new" institutional constraints. The opening is extensive and
unstructured, i.e., protestors' demands and strategies cannot be
carefully crafted as responses to partial openings here or there in
the established institutional network of the polity. Such a network
is simply not yet established. But singular institutional points of
reference do exist: some of them should be found among the
institutionalized legacies of past struggles and among the elements
of the emerging new political opportunity structure which can offer
concrete incentives for collective actions.
This new, unstructured political opportunity can be examined
wi th the use of the available institutional modes of analysis. 51 For
SOFor an analysis of the significance of such mechanisms see
Hanspeter Kriesi, op. cit. pp. 173-179.
51A very useful typology of institutionalisms has been
proposed by Peter Hall and Rosemary C. R. Taylor, 1994,
31
example, we realized that the relatively high magnitude of protest
in Poland can be explained through a comparative study of distinct,
though mutually reinforcing, institutional mechanisms, suggested by
the two institutional theories listed in Section 3, cul tural
historical and instrumental, as well as by the resource
mobilization theory. In the East European field, the well-known
dilemma of more cases than variables makes a rigorous test, which
would allow us to pinpoint the "best n explanation, impossible, but
we can determine whether the patterns existing in our data conform
to the expectations suggested by major institutional arguments.
In the field of protest studies there are two major arguments
concerning the link between protest magnitude and characteristics
and other institutional features of the political system:
1. Protesting can be construed as a rational, calculated
response to the lack of access to policy making through other
channels (e. g., the lack of a tri-partite commission, thus the
lack of corporatist inclusion). The smaller the access to
other channels, the higher the probability of protest;
2. Protesting can best seen as a useful strategy in inter
organizational competition involving several competitors
(trade unions). When there are several unions (or union
federations) I they tend to engage in protests in order to
demonstrate their "champions-of-the-working-people"
credentials and to outbid each other in wooing potential
supporters. 52 The higher the number of labor unions the higher
the probability of protest.
Following the logic of the first explanation we expect that there
"Political Science and the Four Institutionalisms," APSA
convention paper.
52This 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. II
Peter Hall and Rosemary C. R. Taylor, op. cit., p. 3.
32
will be less strikes and labor-related demonstrations in states
which institutionalized the interaction between labor unions,
employers, and the relevant state agencies. As Wallace and Jenkins
noted, the institutionalization of neocorporatist bargaining
diminishes the likelihood of protest. Countries with a strong
social democratic party (Hungary) and a centralized labor sector
(Hungary, former East Germany, Slovakia) are expected to have less
industrial conflicts and strikes than a more pluralistic country
wi th several unions that do not have II direct access to the II
political process (Poland). 53
These expected regularities are indeed confirmed by our data.
One of the most prominent features of Hungarian, Slovak, and East
German transitory politics was the early institution of top level
corporatist arrangements. For example, in Hungary it was the
Council for Interest Reconciliation; in Slovakia - the Council of
Economic and Social Agreement. 54 And as expected, Poland had by far
the highest incidence and magnitude of strikes.
The second institutional explanation, emphasizing inter-union
competition is also confirmed by our data. The Polish trade union
sector was much more diversified and de-centralized than its
53Michael Wallace and J. Craig Jenkins, The New Class,
Postindustrialism, and Neocorporatism: Three Images of Social
Protest in Western Democracies, in: The Politics of Social
Protest, p. 134.
54We base our knowledge of the Hungarian tri-partite
organization on Greskovits' "Hungerstrikers, the unions, the
government and the parties. A case-study of Hungarian
transformation; conflict, the social pact and democratic
development,1I Occasional papers in European Studies 6, University
of Essex 1995; Janos Kornai's lecture and our conversations with
both. Kornai described it as a "second government, 11 dominated by
the former communist union officials, which bears the bulk of
responsibility for Hungary's extremely high level of social
spending (lecture, Princeton University, 03.04.94.). For Slovakia
see Darina Malova, "The relationship between the state, political
parties and civil society in postcommunist Czecho-Slovakia,"
paper presented at the Center for European Studies, Harvard
University, May 1993, pp. 24 27. Malova observes that "it might
be assumed that the admission of corporate groups to the process
of public policy would reduce the future social and political
conflicts," p. 25.
33
Hungarian, Slovak, and German counterparts. As expected, Poland had
the higher magnitude of strikes, which often had as one of their
goals "outcompeting" rival trade unions. 55
4.3. Historical-cultural institutional explanation.
Strong evidence exists that traditions and previous
experiences of protest is a good indicator of future protest
actions. Collective action is predicated here on learning
experience as well as the availability of resources inherited from
previous struggles. The comparison of our countries clearly shows
that the high magnitude of protest in Poland can be linked to the
existing tradition of protest. Poland was the only country in the
former Soviet bloc which experienced five major political crisis
culminating in the "self-limiting revolution" of 1980-81. During
the Solidarity period millions of Poles participated in collective
protests and learned necessary skills of contentious politics. This
argument is additionally supported by the fact that the most common
forms of protest (i.e. strikes) had been developed earlier by the
Solidarity movement as its core strategy of contention.
Hungary, by contrast, has a well-established tradition of
street demonstrations and struggles (1956 in particular), which
played a significant role during the power transfer period (1988
1990). The unions and other protest organizers in former East
Germany should be influenced by the dominant action repertoire
brought over by West German unions and other SMOs, which organize
most of the protest actions there. As Koopmans and Kriesi report,
demonstrative strategy dominated the German action repertoire. 56
Moreover, the 1989 oppositional movement in former East Germany
relied heavily on street demonstrations as their main protest
strategy. Finally, Slovakia'S protest traditions are almost non-
55"The labor continued to be dominated by postcommunist
federations, mostly MSZOSZ - The National Federation of Hungarian
Trade Unions. See Greskovits, ibid., p. 10.
56Ruud Koopmans and Hanspeter Kriesi, "Institutional
Structures and Prevailing Strategies," in New Social Movements in
Western Europe, p. 50.
34
existent, though it should be noted that the main form of protest
developed by the Czechoslovak dissidents was letter writing. Given
these historical traditions, Poland should have the highest
magnitude of protest among the four countries. The Polish ratio of
street demonstrations to strikes should be considerably lower than
in Hungary or Germany and Slovakia should experience little strikes
or demonstrations.
The empirical data used to verify this hypothesis are
summarized in Table 2. The hypotheses are strongly confirmed.
Poland has the highest magnitude of protest. Hungarian protestors
chose street demonstrations four times more often than strikes;
German protestors demonstrated six times more often than they went
on strike. Poland had the highest magnitude of strikes and Poles
were almost equally prone to strike and to demonstrate. This is an
expected result given the relatively long, established tradition of
political conflicts disguised as industrial conflicts in Poland. In
Slovakia, the most frequently used protest strategy was letter
writing (see Table 4) .
4.4. Resource mobilization theory.
While various institutional arguments allow us to account for
the differences between Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, and German
magnitudes of protest, their dynamics, varying repertoires of
contention, and various ratios of strikes to demonstrations in
these countries, one would be hard pressed to argue that the five
Lander of the former East Germany -- with their volatile protest
politics -- inherited a long-term, elaborate, "domestic" tradition
of protest, particularly street demonstrations.
57
In order to explain the origins of specific features of
protest politics in former East Germany we turned to the resource
mobilization approach, which suggests that at least in some
57However, a very recent tradition of demonstrations
developed in some locations. See, for example Suzanne Lohmann,
IIDynamics of Informational Cascades: The Monday Demonstrations in
Leipzig, East Germany, 1989-91," World Politics, October 1994,
47(1), pp.42-101.
35
situations the magnitude of protest depends on the availability of
material, organizational and cultural resources at the disposal of
real or potential challenging groups. Countries where protest
organizers have access to richer resources will have a higher level
of contention. Such resources may be developed internally by
collective actors within a given society (this will be the case of
Polish Solidarity) or may be transferred through trans-national and
trans regional channels from the resource-rich to resource-poor
countries and regions (this is the case of the former GDR). The
transfer and diffusion of resources will depend on the availability
of collective actors who are willing to pursue collective action
and on the compatibility (in cultural and organizational terms) of
countries or regions. While trans-national links and diffusion are
relatively common, only on rare occasions do such transfers involve
the wholesale shift of organizational structures, activists, and
resources as occurred after the re-unification of Germany. One
could argue therefore that the high magnitude of collective protest
in the former East Germany reflects the external transfer of
resources for collective action.
v. Conclusions.
In the first section of this paper we established a need to
study the bottom-up mechanisms of democratic consolidation. We
proposed that this largely neglected area can be fruitfully studied
.through event analysis of protest behavior. The second and third
sections offer selected results from our four-country study of the
post-communist protest politics. In the fourth part we offer
explanations of the observed phenomena derived from the four
established research traditions. This exercise leads us to the
following general conclusions:
1. Varieties in the magnitude, repertoires, and strategies of
protest politics cannot be fully explained by reference to people 's
perceptions and assessments of their situation, as the
"deprivation" approach suggests: the states with more discontent do
not necessarily have more protest activities than the states with
less discontent. Therefore, analyses of the post-1989 reforms in
36
East Central Europe which explain political changes (e.g.,
electoral successes of the post-communist parties) by simply
relating them to people's growing discontent may all be erroneous.
2. Moreover, our comparative analysis of East European protest
politics reveals that these politics are not simply determined by
a configuration of lIobjectivetl economic (or political) factors.
3. No single theory of collective action explains all of the
observed variance in protest characteristics we discovered. The
best fit between theory and empirical results is achieved when
propositions derived several theories are combined. Our argument is
that collective protest in democratizing societies is best
explained from an institutional perspective that combines the
concept of resources in a broad sense, that is including
traditions, symbols, and discourses alongside material and
organizational elements, with the concept of institutional
opportunities, which are produced by emerging organizational
patterns within the state as well as political and civil societies.
The "resource II segment of such a syncretic explanation allows us to
account for the relatively high magnitude and specific features of
protest in the former East Germany, while the "institutional
ll
part
helps to illuminate the highest magnitude of protest in Poland and
the differences in protest repertoires between Poland, Slovakia,
and Hungary_
4. It has been theorized that Poland, which instituted the
most radical economic reforms (shock therapy) would also experience
the highest magnitude of protest. This expectation is indeed
confirmed by our analyses. Yet the reasons for this phenomenon and
the specific features of protest in Poland cannot be explained by
invoking a general sense of deprivation felt by the populace, as is
usually, though often implicitly, practiced. As we demonstrated,
protest's magnitude in Poland kept increasing as people's approval
of the postcommunist economic and political order was also growing.
Our comparative analysis of four cases confirmed a thesis commonly
accepted by the students of protest politics, that protest
activities are driven by much subtler mechanisms, sketched in our
third conclusion.
5. What transpired in Central Europe during the early
37
postcommunist years -- most clearly in Poland -- was a different
kind of institutionalization or consolidation of democracy than the
one Bresser Pereira, Maravall, and Przeworski seem to have had in
mind. They concluded that for the successful consolidation of
democracy "all groups must channel their demands through the
democratic institutions and abjure other tactics. ,,58 But we found
that increasingly institutionalized protest became a "democratic
institution, " which functioned as part-and-parcel of the
democratizing polity. 59 We did not detect any signs that democratic
consolidation was threatened by such an increased magnitude of
contentious collective action. For most observers, the progress of
democratic consolidation in Hungary, Poland, and the former East
Germany passed the point of no return; an authoritarian reversal in
these states is highly unlikely. Yet, Poland experienced a high
magnitude of protest actions. Interestingly, Slovakia, the country
with the least disruptive (most benign) repertoire of protest and
a low level of strike activity, is commonly perceived as the least
consolidated democracy of the four.
We conclude that protest need not be a threat to budding
democracy. It is worth recalling Eckstein's and Gurr's observation
that "the risk of chronic low-level conflict is one of the prices
democrats should expect to pay for freedom from regimentation by
the state - - or by authorities in other social units, whether
industrial establishments, trade unions, schools, universities, or
families. ,,60 Our research indicates that under certain institutional
conditions, protest becomes an indispensable component of
democratic consolidation.
58Luiz Carlos Bresser Pereira, Jose Maria Maravall/ and Adam
Przeworski/ Economic Reforms in New Democracies/ p. 4.
59This argument is developed in Jan Kubik/
"Institutionalization of Protest During Democratic Consolidation
in Central Europe/" in David Meyer and Sidney Tarrow, eds., The
Social Movement Society: Comparative Perspectives, Boulder, Co:
Rowland and Littlefield 1997, forthcoming.
6Harry Eckstein and Ted Robert Gurr, Patterns of Authoritv:
A Structural Basis For Political Inquiry. New York: John Wiley
and Sons 1975, p. 452.
38
Table 1: Post-1989 protest events in East Central Europe (1989-1993)
1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 Total
Poland 314 306 292 314 250 1,476
Slovakia - 50 82 116 47 295
Hungary 122 126 191 112 148 699
East Germany 222 188 291 268 283 1,254
Table 2: General measures of protest activities in the four countries, 1989-1993
Poland Slovakia Hungary GDR
Population (15-64) in
millions
25 4 7 11
Protest events 1,476 295 699 1,254
Protest days 14,881 2,206 2,574 5,349
Protest/year 295 74 140 251
Protest days/year 2,976 441 515 1,070
Protest days/yearl
million population
119.4 110.3 73 97
Strikes 432 24 61 107
Demonstrations 544 87 244 607
Ratio: demo/strike 1.26 I 3.63 4.0 5.7
Strikes/yearl
million population
3.5 1.5 1.74 1.95
Demonstrations/
year/million population
4.35 5.45 6.97 11.04
Table 3: General Protest Strategies in East Central Europe
Protest Strategies Poland Hungary Slovakia GDR
violent 115
5.0%
21
1.7%
9
2.0%
286
13.2%
disruptive 1,145
49.5%
382
30.8%
142
31.2%
1,054
48.7%
non-disruptive 1,051
45.5%
838
67.5%
304
66.8%
826
38.1%
N = all strategies 2,311 1,241 455 2,183
Table 4: Specific Protest Strategies in East Central Europe
Protest Strategies Poland Hungary Slovakia GDR
Strike 432 64 25 128
18.7% 5.1% 5.5% 5.9%
Occupation of public 119 8 4 76
buildings 5.1 % .6% .8% 3.5%
Demonstration/march! 544 296 94 792
blockade 23.5% 23.7% 20.7% 36.6%
Strike alert/threat to 408 141 48 64
undertake protest action 17.7% 11.3% 10.5% 3.0%
Violent 115 21 9 286
5.0% 1.7% 2.0% 13.2%
Open letters/statements 316 406 182 180
13.7% 32.5% 40.0% 8.3%
Other 377 312 93 639
16.3% 25.0% 20.4% 29.5%
N =number of strategies 2,311 1,248 455 2,165
Table 5: Socio-vocational category of participants
Category of Participants Poland Hungary Slovakia GDR
workers 516
34.4%
71
14.3%
74
22.0%
170
18.4%
farmers! peasants 141
9.4%
28
5.6%
15
4.4%
24
2.6%
service sector 121
8.1%
17
3.4%
18
5.3%
31
3.4%
public state sector 350
23.3%
161
32.5%
111
32.8%
194
21.0%
youth 154
10.3%
63
12.7%
20
5.9%
255
27.7%
other 218
14.5%
156
31.5%
100
29.6%
248
26.9%
N = total recorded categories 1,500 496 338 922
Table 6: Organizations sponsoring or leading protest actions
Organizations
none
political parties
labor unions
Peasant/farmer organizations
interest groups
social/political movements
other
N = number of organizations
167
11.6%
89
6.2%
709
49.1%
80
5.5%
91
6.3%
228
15.8%
80
5.5%
1,444
125 174 50
12.2% 11.7% 10.5%
263 99 335
25.8% 23.2% 20.1%
275 160 70
15.7% 16.4% 16.5%
6 9 3
.6% .5% .7%
56 117 56
11.5% 3.4% 13.2%
69 137 553
13.4% 16.2% 33.2%
79 262 213
15.7% 20.9% 18.5%
1,021' 1,664 426
Table 7: Types of demands
Demand type Poland Hungary Slovakia GDR
economic 1.100
57.2%
301
29.5%
119
26.0%
458
26.9%
political 586
30.5%
444
43.5%
176
38.5%
524
30.8%
other 236
12.3%
276
27.0%
162
35.5%
722
42.4%
N = total demands 1,922 1,021 457 1,704
Table 8: Targets of protest actions
Ultimate targets of
protest actions
Poland Hungary Slovakia GDR
president 92
4.8%
25
2.5%
20
4.2%
4
.2%
parliament 247
12.8%
155
15.8%
125
26.4%
272
14.5%
governmenumUristries
central agencies
989
51.3%
449
45.6%
239
50.4%
654
34.8%
local government 177
9.2%
111
11.3%
11
2.3%
493
26.3%
management 322
16.7%
38
3.9%
23
4.9%
39
2.1 %
domestic and foreign
owners
15
.8%
25
2.5%
0
0%
69
3.7%
other 87
4.5%
181
18.4%
56
11.8%
347
18.5%
N = number of targets 1,929 984 474 1,878
Table 10: Selected rankings of the Central European states
(I)
Protest
magnitude
(2)
CSPP:
approval of
political
regime:
1993 - 91
(3)
CSPP:
approval of
economic
system:
1993-91
(4)
Mason:
Index of
Political
Alienation
(5)
Komai:
real wages
(1993 as %
of 1989)
(6)
Inequality
1993: Gini
Coefficient
(7')
Rutkowski:
P90/PI0
(7")
Ferge:
P90/P1O
(8)
Ferge:
Evaluation
of change
in
households
(9)
Mean
(2)-(8)
(10)
Commulative
decline of
GDP, 1989
1993
(11)
Sachs-
Warner
Refonn
Index
Poland 1 3 3 2 1 1 2 1 3 2 3 1,2,3
(+ 17) (+ 19) (72.3) (30) (2.92) (6.57) (39 worse) (2) (-12.2)
Slovakia 2 2 1,5 4 2 3 3 4 2 3 I 1,2,3
(+2) (-10) (Czecho (73.3) (19.5) (2.4) (2.89) (51 worse) (2.6) (-27.4)
slovakia)
GDR 3 - - 3 - - - 3
(3.05)
4
(19 worse)
4
(3.3)
- -
Hungary 4 1 1,5 1 3 2 1 2 1 1 2 1,2,3
(-6) (-10) (85) (23) (3.6) (3.31) (51 worse) (1.6) (-16.8)
GRAPH 1: Protest days in Poland
4500 .
4000
3500
3000 i
2500 !
2000 i
1500 ~
1000 '
I
I
500
0
1989 1990 1991 1992 1993
GRAPH 3: Protest days in Hungary
4500
4000
3500
3000
2500
2000
1500
1000
500
0
I

-
.1
1989 1990
-
1991 1992 1993
GRAPH 2: Protest days in Slovakia
4500
4000 .
3500
3000
2500
2000 .
1500 .
1000

II

500 .
0
1989 1990 1991 1992
-
1993
GRAPH 4: Protest days in East Gerr.nany
4500
4000
3500
3000 .
2500
2000
1500 .
1000 '
500 :
o .

I_I
I
1989
-
1990 1991 1992 1993
GRAPH 5: Approval of political and GRAPH 6: Approval of political and
economic regime in Hungary economic regime in Slovakia
80 80 r' ,.. .-.. '
70 , 70
60 60
50 50
40 40
30 30
:20 20
10 10
o o
1991 1992 1993
[ p.olitical II economic
GRAPH 8: Approval of political and
economic regime in East Germany
80 .-,
80
70
70
60
60
50
50
40
40
30 30
20
:20
10
0,'.-------------------
10
o
1991 1992
political II economic
1991 1992 1993
[.. political II economi9 J
GRAPH 7: Approval of political and
economic regime in Poland
1991 1992 1993
[. econilllJcJ
1993
The Minda de Gunzburg Center or Europem Studies
The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies is an interdisciplinary
program organized within the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and
designed to promote the study of Europe. The Cenle!"s governing committees
represent the major social science departments at Harvard and the
Massachusetts Institute of TechnolOgy.
Since its establishment in 1969, the Center has tried to orient students towards
questions that have been neglected. both about past developments in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European societies and about the present.
The Center's approach is comparative and interdisciplinary, with a strong
emphasis on the historical and cultural sources which shape a country's
political and economic polices and social structures. Major interests of Center
members include elements common to industrial societies: the role of the state
in the political economy of each country, political behavior, sodal movements,
parties and elections, trade unions, intellectuals, labor markets and the crisis of
industrialization, science policy, and the interconnections between a country's
culture and politics.
For a complete list of Center publications (Working Paper Series, Program for
the Study of Germany and Europe Working Paper Series, Program on Central
and Eastem Europe Worlcing Paper Series, and French Politics and Society, a
quarterly journal) please contact the Publications Department, 27 Kirkland St,
Cambridge MA 02138. Additional copies can be purchased for $5.00 each. A
monthly calendar of events at the Center is also available at no cost.