Explaining the Intensity of Ethno-Nationalist Contention

The claims-making behavior of ethnopolitical communities spans three primary forms—electoral party politics, social movement protest behavior, and violent rebellion. In this study we posit that the three forms constitute a scale of increasingly contentious activity; where politically feasible, communities that give rise to the most intense forms of political behavior will also tend to be engaged in all lower levels of activity. Working within a “contentious politics” framework, we view protest, rebellion, conventional electoral politics, and quiescence as normally substitutable strategic choices, and we develop a new, Guttman-scaled dependent variable that allows us to explore the determinants of these strategies concurrently. Using multinomial logit on original data from the seventeen autonomous communities of Spain over a twenty-year period, we test the ability of the predominant model of ethnopolitical conflict (Gurr, 1993a, 1993b, 2000) to account for variation in the intensity of nationalist political behavior. This design effectively permits us to ask a central question: what incites nations to move up the “ladder of expression”—from quiescence to electoral strategies, from election to protest, and from protest to rebellion? The results demonstrate that the four principal components of Gurr’s model—identity, incentives, capacity, and opportunities—assume vital, yet non-linear, roles in determining a community’s level of electoral, violent, and non-violent contentious activity. The findings also show that there are crucial differences in what accounts for the moves to electoral contention, to protest, and to rebellion. Several of these factors are uniformly escalatory on the intensity of contention—especially repression and contagion—while others, most importantly democratic durability, have a moderating effect.