Factors of Mobilization to Protest, Their Impact and Variability : Hierarchical Bayesian Approach

Mobilization to protest is a category of political action that has been observed quite often over the past two decades - for example, The Arab Spring, The Yellow Vests, and BLM movements can be named here. Indeed, mass protests are the voice that a crowd can use to deliver a directive message to political elites. But what can be called a driver of mobilization for protests is a debatable question. First, in different countries, the same indicator may give a different response. Secondly, the situation can change from year to year. Therefore, in this work, an attempt was made to identify what factors can be called drivers of the growth of mobilization to protests in 48 different countries of the world over an extended period of 15 years (from 2004 to 2018). The paper used methods of hierarchical Bayesian clustering, with the help of which it became possible to find out how the influence of factors of mobilization to protests differs when countries are grouped according to geographic (continental) and regime (level of democratization) characteristics. Also, the work managed to establish the fact that the most significant trigger (from the pool of those tested) to the mobilization of protests is the level of economic discontent of citizens - grievances