Political context, organizational engagement, and protest in African countries

Abstract

*† This article analyzes levels of protest mobilization in eighteen African countries—by far the region least studied by researchers of protest dynamics. Theoretically, its goal is to integrate the role of organizational engagement into political opportunity approaches to protest mobilization. Empirically, it uses African data to test whether Western-driven theories provide useful insights for analyzing protest dynamics in developing countries. The analysis yields three major findings: (1) the more open and democratic the political context, the more individuals mobilize, although the impact of the political opportunity structure in repressive contexts is less certain; (2) the more individuals are engaged in organizations, excluding religious organizations, the more they mobilize; (3) the impact of individual organizational engagement on the probability of mobilizing in protests does not change across contexts. Scholars working in the political process tradition largely agree on three dimensions that shape protest mobilization: political opportunities, organizations, and framing processes (McAdam 1999; Kriesi, Koopmans, Duyvendak, and Giugni 1995; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001). Nevertheless, most work has focused on one dimension over the others. In particular, the reductionist view of political opportunities has taken some criticism: “perceived and socially constructed opportunities have given way to ‘political opportunity structures’ (POS) and, with this change, what once was conceived of as a structural/ constructionist account of movement emergence has become a structurally determinist one” (McAdam 1999: 6). While political opportunities have generally been considered political opportunity “structures,” resource mobilization theory (RMT) focused on organizations (McCarthy and Zald 1977) and later work privileging relational approaches focused on networks among organizations and activists (Diani and McAdam 2003). Meanwhile, interpretative frames have been the favorite object of cultural approaches that analyze the cognitive, affective, and emotional sides of participation and engagement in collective action (Melucci 1989; Snow and Benford 1992; Johnston and Klandermans 1995; Polletta and Jasper 2001). In this article, I integrate perspectives on political opportunities with the analysis of the organizational dimension. I do so by examining the impact of different types of political regimes and engagement in organizations on individual mobilization. In addition, I advance some hypotheses on the moderating effect of political regimes on the impact that organizational engagement has on mobilization. I argue this approach is particularly fruitful when analyzing repressive contexts because organizational resources—both material and symbolic— may partly counterbalance the dampening effects of a closed political context. In fact, organizations convey