Political context, organizational engagement, and protest in African countries

This article analyzes levels of protest mobilization in eighteen African countries-by far the region least studied by researchers of protest dynamics. Theoretically, its goal is to integrate the role of organizational engagement into political opportunity approaches to protest mobilization. Empirically, it uses African data to test whether Western-driven theories provide useful insights for analyzing protest dynamics in developing countries. The analysis yields three major findings: (1) the more open and democratic the political context, the more individuals mobilize, although the impact of the political opportunity structure in repressive contexts is less certain; (2) the more individuals are engaged in organizations, excluding religious organizations, the more they mobilize; (3) the impact of individual organizational engagement on the probability of mobilizing in protests does not change across contexts. © 2011 Mobilization: An International Journal.SCOPUS: ar.j