The paper discuss the concept of protest democracy to capture a specific regime logic in post-transitional societies, where recurring waves of mass mobilization function as a safety valve against democratic erosion and authoritarian drift. Focusing on the Balkans, a region marked by weak state institutions, political clientelism, and recurrent crises of representativity, the paper examines how civil movements periodically reassert democratic norms and rights when representative mechanisms fail or are suppressed.

Empirically, the analysis draws on an original comparative protest events database covering Southeast Europe from the late 1980s to the present. The dataset enables a systematic examination of protest frequency, repertoires of contention, claims, and political outcomes across countries and time. The findings suggest that while protest waves rarely result in deep institutional reform, they play a crucial corrective role: constraining the concentration of power, forcing elite turnover, and temporarily restoring democratic accountability through bottom-up resistance.

By conceptualizing protest as a recurrent mechanism of democratic correction, the paper contributes to broader debates on theories of political systems and social movements, offering a regional perspective on the political functions of protest politics in contemporary Europe.

Following the 2008 financial crisis, grassroots movements across the globe called for systemic change and sought to reimagine democratic participation. While protests in Eastern and Central Europe have rarely been included in debates about post-recession movements, this article offers a new reading of their significance for theorizing contemporary activism in the region. Drawing on radical democratic perspectives, it argues that rather than merely criticising their governments for the unfulfilled promises of liberal transition, grassroots mobilisations – such as the Latvian digital participation platform MyVoice – sought to prefigure alternative political realities. Founded in 2011 amid a continuing economic and political crisis in the country, the platform signified not only a demand for a desired democracy but its realisation through creating a new practice of political participation. Prefigurative perspective challenges simplistic binaries of success and failure when analysing social movements in the postsocialist context, particularly when such movements do not fit into pre-established frameworks of the political system and civil society. The case of MyVoice illustrates how democracy can be continually reimagined through bottom-up initiatives that disrupt established political practices while also constituting new forms of civic engagement.

This paper offers a comparative analysis of the 2011 Indignados movement in Spain and the two waves of political protest in Bulgaria in 2013. While these mobilizations shared key similarities—most notably opposition to austerity measures and political corruption, as well as far-reaching consequences for party system realignment—the forms of democratic innovation they generated diverged markedly. In Spain, the Indignados protests were characterized by occupation practices, followed by decentralized neighborhood-level mobilization and sustained experimentation with techno-political solutions. By contrast, the Bulgarian protests stared with more desire for experimentation and radical change in the political system, but by the summer of 2013 exhibited more centralizing dynamics, focusing protest action primarily in the capital Sofia. Rather than assessing whether civil society in these contexts was active, the paper examines how it was active, emphasizing the distinct repertoires of innovation that emerged in each case and their sustainability and impact. The paper identifies several factors that help explain the more experimental character of the Spanish protests, including their embeddedness in broader transnational activist networks across Southern Europe and Latin America, local cultures of translation, and the influence of techno-optimistic intellectual currents. Finally, the paper traces how varying degrees of innovation shaped the protests’ biographical, policy, and cultural impacts, as well as subsequent cycles of contention in both countries.