Choosing Between Forms of Contention

When do unanswered political demands lead to organized political violence, and when do they inspire a new political party or a new protest movement instead? Contentious politics can take a wide variety of forms, including election campaigns, protests, and even violent direct action outside the conventional political arena. Research on contentious politics has tended to focus on one of these activities at a time, developing theories of how and when new parties emerge, or of why activists participate in protests, or about the motivations for violent direct action (e.g. sabotage or terror). However, these isolated theories cannot answer holistic questions about how these forms of contention interact. In this paper we develop a theory of how the use of one form of contention makes the others less likely. We argue that if unanswered political demands give rise to a new party or a new protest movement, the possibility of political violence can be forestalled. We focus on the populist radical right, and on environmentalists, in developed democracies. We use a new protest database, combined with electoral data and survey data, to show that this theory has considerable power to predict choice between forms of contention. We discuss the implications of this how political organizations compete for resources, and for how democracies represent their citizens.