Contentious Politics in New Democracies: Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Former East Germany Since 1989

Transcription

1 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 New Brunswick NJ 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 ( ). 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 compared with the predictions derived from four theoretical traditions: (a) relative deprivation; (b) instrumental 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 political vitality of new democracies.

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3 I. The location of our project in the literature on democratic consolidations.1 The research project 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

4 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 Por 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 See, 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

5 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, ; 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 " all Central European countries were declared to be free and scored high both on political rights and civil liberties measures. 3

6 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 I all countries have been undergoing a difficult economic 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

7 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 See Grzegorz Ekiert, Rebellious Poles: Political Crises and Popular Protest under State Socialism, ," East European Politics and Societies (1997), 11, 2, pp

8 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 elitelevel 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 For the elaboration of this point see our "Collective Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland, ," Pew Papers on Central Eastern European Reform and Regionalism, No.3, Center of International Studies, Princeton University, llguillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule. Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1986, pp

9 with 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 games14 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 John 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

10 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 ; Herbert Kitschelt, "The Formation of Party Systems in East Central Europe, II Politics and Society (1992), 20, I, pp See, 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 ; Luiz Carlos Bresser Pereira, Jose Maria Maravall and Adam Przeworski, Economic Reforms in New Democracies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press See Claus Offe, IICapitalism by Democratic Design? Democratic Theory Facing the Triple Transition in East Central Europe," Social Research (1991), 58, 4, pp ; 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

11 activities 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 ( ) and Spain ( ), in Richard Gunter, Nikiforos Diamandouros, and Hans-Jurgen Puhle, eds., Politics of Democratic Consolidation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1995, pp ; 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, Charles 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, , Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1975; Charles Tilly, The Contentious French, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1986; Charles Tilly, Repertoires of Contention in America and Britain , in: The Dynamic of Social Movements, edited by M. Zald and J.D. McCarthy, Cambridge: Winthrop 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

12 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 process. 21 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 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 See, 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 ; Krzysztof Zagorski," Hope Factor, Inequality, and Legitimacy of Systemic Transformations: The Case of Poland, II Communist and Post-Communist Studies (1994), 27, 4, pp Sidney Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder. Protest and Politics in Italy Oxford: Clarendon Press 1989, pp See also his "Mass Mobilization and Regime Change, II in The Politics of Democratic Consolidation, pp

13 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 Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995, pp ; 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 ; Susan Olzak, "Analysis of Events in the Study of Collective Action," Annual Review of Sociology, 1989, 15, pp ; Dieter Rucht, Ruud Koopmans, and FriedheIm Neidhardt, eds., Protest Event Analysis: Methodological Perspectives and Empirical Results, forthcoming. II

14 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 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

15 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 severalmonth-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 protocol: (a) duration, (b) number of participants, and (c) scope. 25 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 There 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 ). Since our index of magnitude is based on only one measure (duration) its validity is weak. But we traded validity for high reliability_ 13

16 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 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 This 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

17 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

18 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

19 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

20 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

21 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

22 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 partysystems was seen as a more or less uncomplicated task. The recreation 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 See Ralf Dahrendorf, Reflection on the Revolution in Europe, New York: Random House See Herbert Kitschelt, lithe Formation of Party Systems in East Central Europe, II and IIFormation of Party Cleavages in Post 20

23 The four countries included in the project represent distinct types of post-communist transformations and have experienced contrasting political and economic developments since 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

24 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

25 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 ~mmense 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 macroeconomic 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 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

26 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 John 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

27 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 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 Richard 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, David Mason, "Attitudes Towards the Market and the State in Postcommunist Europe," paper presented at the 1992 Annual Meeting of APSA, Chicago, Ill., p Janos 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. 4 World 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 Jan 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,

28 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

29 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 approach 11 is ill-equipped to field. Changes in magnitude, 45Richard Rose and Christian Haerpfer, op. cit., pp and

30 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 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 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

31 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, There 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 See debates on cycles of protest and especially Doug McAdam, "'Initiator' and 'Spin-off' Movements: Diffusion 29

32 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

33 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 with 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 A very useful typology of institutionalisms has been proposed by Peter Hall and Rosemary C. R. Taylor, 1994, 31

34 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, culturalhistorical 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 interorganizational 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

35 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 with several unions that do not have II direct II access to the 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 We 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, ). 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 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

36 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 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 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 ( ). 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 Ruud Koopmans and Hanspeter Kriesi, "Institutional Structures and Prevailing Strategies," in New Social Movements in Western Europe, p

37 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) 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, ," World Politics, October 1994, 47(1), pp

38 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

39 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

40 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 This 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. 6 Harry Eckstein and Ted Robert Gurr, Patterns of Authoritv: A Structural Basis For Political Inquiry. New York: John Wiley and Sons 1975, p

41 Table 1: Post-1989 protest events in East Central Europe ( ) Total Poland ,476 Slovakia Hungary East Germany ,254 Table 2: General measures of protest activities in the four countries, Population (15-64) in millions Poland Slovakia Hungary GDR Protest events 1, ,254 Protest days 14,881 2,206 2,574 5,349 Protest/year Protest days/year 2, ,070 Protest days/yearl million population Strikes Demonstrations Ratio: demo/strike 1.26 I Strikes/yearl million population Demonstrations/ year/million population

42 Table 3: General Protest Strategies in East Central Europe Protest Strategies Poland Hungary Slovakia GDR violent % % 9 2.0% % disruptive 1, % % % 1, % non-disruptive 1, % % % % N = all strategies 2,311 1, ,183 Table 4: Specific Protest Strategies in East Central Europe Protest Strategies Poland Hungary Slovakia GDR Strike % 5.1% 5.5% 5.9% Occupation of public buildings 5.1 %.6%.8% 3.5% Demonstration/march! blockade 23.5% 23.7% 20.7% 36.6% Strike alert/threat to undertake protest action 17.7% 11.3% 10.5% 3.0% Violent % 1.7% 2.0% 13.2% Open letters/statements % 32.5% 40.0% 8.3% Other % 25.0% 20.4% 29.5% N =number of strategies 2,311 1, ,165

43 Table 5: Socio-vocational category of participants Category of Participants Poland Hungary Slovakia GDR workers % % % % farmers! peasants % % % % service sector % % % % public state sector % % % % youth % % % % other % % % % N = total recorded categories 1, 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 % % % % % % % 1, % 11.7% 10.5% % 23.2% 20.1% % 16.4% 16.5% %.7%.5% % 13.2% 3.4% % 16.2% 33.2% % 18.5% 15.7% 1,021' 426 1,664

44 Table 7: Types of demands Demand type Poland Hungary Slovakia GDR economic % % % % political % % % % other % % % % N = total demands 1,922 1, ,704 Table 8: Targets of protest actions Ultimate targets of protest actions Poland Hungary Slovakia GDR president % % % 4.2% parliament % % % % governmenumuristries central agencies % % % % local government % % % % management % % % % domestic and foreign owners 15.8% % 0 0% % other % % % % N = number of targets 1, ,878

45 Table 10: Selected rankings of the Central European states (I) Protest magnitude (2) CSPP: approval of political regime: (3) CSPP: approval of economic system: (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, (11) Sachs- Warner Refonn Index Poland ,2,3 (+ 17) (+ 19) (72.3) (30) (2.92) (6.57) (39 worse) (2) (-12.2) Slovakia 2 2 1, I 1,2,3 (+2) (-10) (Czecho (73.3) (19.5) (2.4) (2.89) (51 worse) (2.6) (-27.4) slovakia) GDR (3.05) 4 (19 worse) 4 (3.3) - - Hungary 4 1 1, ,2,3 (-6) (-10) (85) (23) (3.6) (3.31) (51 worse) (1.6) (-16.8)