Class, Regime and Protest in Democratisation from Below. A comparison of 1989 and 2011

Research on regime transition processes has looked at either economy and class or formal regime structures as precondition for democracy, within however a structuralist perspective. Research on social movements has taken a dynamic turn, focusing however on political opportunities, and instead only very rarely addressing issues of class and capitalism. What remained understudied is the ways in which specific institutions of authoritarian regime interact with the social bases for and the forms social movements take. This paper aim at bridging this gap by looking at the impact of socio-economic assets (and their evolution) during the eventful protests linked to episods of democratization in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the MENA region in 2011, The paper uses a mix strategy of most-different and most similar research design in intra-area and cross-area comparisons. Process tracing is applied to a secondary analysis of existing research, in order to single out the different class coalitions among oppositions and incumbents, as well as their evolutions during the protests.