LEGAL AND ILLEGAL PROTEST - A CROSS-CULTURAL-ANALYSIS

This paper focuses on the extent to which the causes of political protest in different countries depend on their political, economic, and cultural differences. To deal with this question a model of legal and illegal political protest is proposed and tested with three national representative surveys of the populations of three countries with great political, economic, and cultural differences: Germany (without the former GDR), Israel and Peru. The statistical analyses first show that the means of the determinants of legal and illegal protest are very similar. Second, the kind of factors that affect protest in the three countries are largely the same. The most important difference found concerns the impact of political discontent weighted by factors that describe the perceived political efficacy of the respondents on political protest. The influence of these variables was relatively strong in Peru, although the effect was not large in absolute terms. In general, the variables of the model are able to explain political protest in different contexts.