Can Varieties of Welfare Capitalism Explain the Varying Encompassingness of Occupy-Type Protests?

Waves of contention that diffuse across countries call for explanations of national variations in the form and zeitgeist of protests that share a strong family resemblance. In 2011 Indignados movements in Southern Europe and Israel were followed by “Occupy Wall Street” and its sister protests in Europe and North America. All shared similar demands, practices and types of core activists, yet differed dramatically in their scope and scale of mobilization. Compared with Occupy, Indignados movements were far more encompassing: highly consensual and accompanied by massive street mobilizations. I argue that typologies developed to explain the varying features of social and economic policy, culture and behavior in advanced democracies offer only limited traction in solving this empirical puzzle. The challenge facing comparative research on protest is to identify causal mechanisms responsible for national variations in the outcomes of interest, which may or may not be inked to broad political-economic regimes.