Ondrej Cisar

Drawing on a unique dataset of protest events, this comparative project focuses on extra‐parliamentary political activism in four post‐communist countries – the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland – and analyzes the conditions conducive to the emergence and establishment of democratic forms of activism, and democracy as its expression. The project studies cross-national, cross‐movement, and over‐time variations in the level of protest and its relation to public opinion and other theoretically relevant (contextual, economic) variables. Among other things, it aims at answering questions about the relative presence of various types of political activism, and explores the relationships between them, and how the population perceives democratic political institutions and their representatives. In order to achieve its main goal, the project draws on and contributes to three bodies of literature, namely political economy of democratization and new democracies, social movements and contentious politics, and public opinion.