Although so far rather overlooked, there is a large cross-national variation in issues that are expressed through contentious politics. For instance, while 52 percent of protest events that took place in Poland in last 20 years were related to economic issues, the Czech Republic had only 5 percent of such protests and it displays much more diversified and equally distributed portfolio of protest issues. The main question of the paper is what explains the cross-country differences in the issue composition expressed through contentious means. We suggest that the general structure of political conflict articulated in the party politics determines issues articulated by contentious means. We analyse four countries that differ in the main issue dimensions of their party politics but are otherwise very similar (the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary) and use issue composition of all protest events that took place in the four countries between 1990 and 2010.
