Transactional and Participatory Activism in the Emerging European Polity

In this article, the authors examine the potential for concerted collective action in the societies that emerged from state socialism in East-Central Europe after 1989. Although scholars have found strong individual-level evidence that protest potential is weaker here than in other parts of the world, the authors question whether individual-level data adequately tap all the dimensions of activism that are relevant to contentious politics. They propose a differentiated model of civil society consisting of (a) internal potential for citizen action and (b) relational aspects of social activism and argue that some forms of the latter—and in particularly, what they call “transactional activism”—are more robust than what evidence at the individual level suggests. They also examine some local and transnational-level data from the region and speculate about the capacities for collective action they find there and their potential for contributing to the construction of a transnational Europe.