Why do people take to the streets? Structural approaches reason that the political opportunity structure is open: protesters are spurred onto the streets because they expect the demonstration to be effective. Structural explanations―however―are limited. Identical structural opportunities do not necessarily lead to identical behaviour. Following Gamson and Meyer (1996) we argue that characteristics of the socio-political structure are perceived. The filtering of opportunities and constraints of the opportunity structure through people’s perceptions and interpretations thereof is underexposed in the literature. We surveyed over 18.000 protesters in seven European countries. Following a POS-reasoning, protesters in the same event should be equally optimistic or pessimistic about the outcome of the demonstration. Obviously, however, our protesters varied from extremely pessimistic to extremely optimistic. Why does the one demonstrator feel efficacious while others feel inefficacious? That’s the focal question of this paper. In answering this question we will focus on contextual and individual factors.
