Eventful Democratisation and Cross-national Diffusion: When Social Movements Change Structures

Research on social movements and democratization alike have looked for the structural conditions that allow the two phenomena to develop. In this paper, I shall rather reverse the order of causality, looking at how protest waves affect the very conditions for their development. . Building upon the concept of eventful protest, the paper will look at the above mentioned cases singling out the specific mechanisms (such as social bridging, scale shifting, diffusion and politicization) which allowed the mobilization to spread, creating and recreating new opportunities. Based a most-different comparative research design (comparing cases cross-time and cross-region), the paper will use a secondary analysis of existing sources as well as protest event analysis.