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Cross-National Comparison of Protest Publics’ Roles as Drivers of Change: From Clusters to Models
In this chapter the authors provide an overview of existing theories of how collective actors effect social change and propose a research design to evaluate protest publics’ contribution into politics, policy dynamics, and democratization.
The authors define and describe four models of how protests publics’ participation in politics, policy development, and processes of democratization function as drivers of social change. It is believed that protest movements effect greater changes in embedded democracies and achieve little or even are destroyed in authoritarian regimes. We come to more complex conclusions beyond this received wisdom that protest publics contribute to social change in polyarchies, where major democratic institutions are already established.