The decision to protest is not taken in a social vacuum. Therefore we devote Chapter 7 to the contextual opportunities and constraint to protest. Social cleavages, political opportunity structures, and repression define the opportunities and constraints imposed by the economic, political-institutional, and cultural context. We describe how context influences demand, supply, and mobilization and how citizens are influenced by these factors. First, we devote attention to the important methodological issue on the need for comparative research designs in investigating how the socio-political context influences citizens’ political participation. Followed by an introduction of the context proper. We describe how the economic, political-institutional, and cultural context combined shapes the contextualization of the social psychology of protest. And, on its turn, how the demand and supply of protest is shaped by these contextual factors, whether protests are mobilized, and, if so, what types of protest. Finally, we illustrate contextualized contestation from a large comparative study of movement and party politics in diverging contexts. We show how contextual variation – “old” and “new” democracies, and new democracies further specified into “post-communist” and “post-authoritarian” regimes – marks the issues citizens worry about and the kind of political participation they undertake in their attempts to tackle these issues.

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

Social psychology is interested in how social context influences individuals’ behavior, focuses on subjective variables, and takes the individual as its unit of analysis, which has important epistemological implications. It implies, inter alia, that questions that take a unit of analysis other than the individual (e.g., a movement, a group, a region, or a country) require other disciplines than social psychology. Hence, social psychology should fare well at explaining why individuals participate or fail to participate in a movement once it has emerged but is not helpful in explaining why social movements emerge or decline. Sociology and political science are better suited for such analyses. Although sociology and political sciences usually do their analyses at levels different than that of the individual, they do build their reasoning on assumptions about individual behavior. This is not to say that every social scientist must become a social psychologist, but it is to say that it is worth the effort to specify the social psychological assumptions that underlie the analyses and to see whether they fit into what social psychologists know about individual behavior. We delineate our disciplinary point of departure and build our model of Contextualized Contestation along the lines of Coleman’s boat.

The aim of the microfoundations movement in management is to link macro management phenomena, such as corporate governance and strategic alliances, with more micro disciplines, such as organizational behavior and psychology. The core ideas of microfoundations are closely related to methodological individualism, which is the epistemological stance stressing the explanatory primacy of individuals and their purposeful behavior. Methodological individualism should be distinguished from ontological individualism, which is the thesis that all social phenomena are created, or caused, by individuals. Coleman’s boat is a visual representation showing how large-scale entities (the macro) influence smaller-scale entities (the micro) and how a macro phenomenon is composed of microscale events and activities. A key limitation of the microfoundations movement is that emergent entities, such as organizations, and their properties are common in management research. The properties of an emergent entity itself cannot be explained away and thus eliminated entirely from explanations involving the exercise of the entity’s causal powers.