With a (Little) Help from My Friends: An Evolution of Activist Modes in Post-Socialist Settings

The article aims to provide an analytical and empirical reassessment of the transformation of post-socialist political activism, with implications for the general analysis of civil society. Based on a distinction between two types of political activism—transactional and participatory—we seek to illustrate how these help us understand the development of the key aspects of post-socialist civil society. First, we conceptualize a general mode of activism with three dimensions: mobilization, transactional capacity, and strategic capacity. Using a unique protest event dataset (1989–2022), we empirically examine this activist mode in two thematic areas of activism—economic and environmental ones—over the course of three decades. We show, first, how each dimension of the activist model is linked to different contextual or intra-organizational factors, and second, that these two fields of activism, which were considered dramatically different, are slowly converging in all three dimensions.