The Dynamics of Ethnonationalist Contention

Ethnopolitical expression spans three primary forms: electoral politics, non-violent protest and violent rebellion. Previous literature has studied these strategies in isolation from one another. Using original data on the seventeen autonomous communities of Spain, this article combines a new method for operationalizing contentious strategies with Gurr’s ethnopolitical conflict model to explain communities’ movements between categories of the full range of nationalist political behaviour. The findings confirm that organizations acting within a community respond to altered incentives and changing political contexts by moving up and down the ‘ladder of contention’; they suggest an under-explored ‘strategic dynamism’ in ethnonational communities. Capturing this dynamic movement allows for a better understanding of which features of a group’s environment have an ‘escalatory’ impact on conflict and which, conversely, have an ‘ameliorative’ effect.