Political opportunity, democracy, and 40 years of protest, 1981–2020: A cross‐national analysis

Objectives : Political opportunity is considered an important factor in any kind of activism, as it represents the context or norms in which a movement operates. Much of the extant literature has focused on political opportunity on a case‐by‐case basis with little consistency in its operationalization. Our goal in this study is to build toward a generalizable measure of political opportunity. To do so, we measured opportunities as democracy and used data from 90+ countries over a 40‐year period, testing the long‐theorized inverse‐U relationship between opportunity and protest. Methods : We used all seven waves of the World Value Survey, which represents much of the world's countries, to examine the link between political opportunity and political behaviors (signing a petition, joining boycotts, and attending peaceful protests). Results : Results confirmed the inverse‐U effect on all three protest behaviors; that is, middle‐of‐the‐road democracies had the highest levels of protest participation, whereas the most representative and most repressive societies had the lowest levels of protest participation. Conclusion : Democracy can be used to represent important dimensions of political opportunity, as it was consistent with the long‐theorized inverse‐U. Moreover, our approach to using democracy, a cross‐national index, may serve as a stepping stone toward a unified and generalizable measure of political opportunity.