ABSTRACT
Exploring links between social capital and political participation may suggest ways that civil society fosters or impedes the democratic process among countries in political transition. This chapter extends general hypotheses of social capital and participation to political protest in 22 East-Central European (ECE) countries. Ordinal logistic regression demonstrates that interpersonal trust indeed plays a role in the willingness to engage in both mild and aggressive forms of protest. Tests control for variables commonly employed in the literature such as level of political rights and civil liberties, political orientation, socio-economic status, and town size. Rather than define protest in the usual way as the actual commission of an act, this chapter examines the proclivity to engage in that act. Thus in addition to examining individual-level data from an unprecedented number of ECE countries in 1999-2001, these analyses also stand apart from recent investigations by creating new measures of unconventional political participation. Results indicate that the probability to engage in militant and non-militant protest increases with a higher degree of interpersonal trust among citizens in post-communist states.
