Political protest and social movements are ubiquitous phenomena. This book focuses on various theoretical approaches that aim at explaining them: the theory of collective action, the resource mobilization perspective, political opportunity structure theory, the identity approach, the framing perspective, and the dynamics of contention approach.

The authors systematically apply rational choice theory in order to suggest hypotheses about political protest. They test these hypotheses by means of surveys and compare their rational choice hypotheses with competing hypotheses.