‘Disobedient Democracy: A Comparative Analysis of Contentious Politics in the European Semi-periphery’ is a research project implemented by the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Zagreb, in the period 2016-2021, led by Principal Investigator Danijela Dolenec and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (IZ11Z0_166540 – PROMYS). The overall objective of the project is to explore how protest politics advances democracy by collecting and analyzing data on protest mobilizations in four countries: Portugal, Spain, Croatia and Serbia.‎

We establish features of political opportunity structures of Croatia and Serbia as parameters that help explain the strategies pursued by housing and anti-debt social movements in the two countries. Relying on the protest event analysis data for 2007-2017, we identify peaks in protest mobilisations and levels of disruptiveness. Furthermore, we analyse the actors' strategy of electoral contestation and compare it across cases. In Croatia, movement actors organised into political parties, while in Serbia, the electoral turn has remained fringe. We argue that this divergence can be explained by different levels of institutional openness to new challengers.

Analyses of protest dynamics in Croatia are rare, partially because until know it was not possible to view them systematically. Relying on the newly collected protest event data 2000-2017, this paper describes the main trends and dynamics of protest activities in Croatia in the observed period. It re-examines Beissinger and Sasse's claim about the absence of austerity related protests in Croatia after 2008. The analysis shows that though protests directly addressing austerity were relatively scarce, when the protest set is expanded to protests which demanded free public education, advocated labour rights, and fought for the right to the city, the prevailing thesis about "quietism" in Croatia can be challenged. The paper aims to relate some of the observed protest dynamics to Kerbo's distinction between movements of crisis and movements of affluence. Focusing on the period between the student movement in 2008 until Facebook protests in 2011, it shows that the student movement and "the right to the city" movement preceded Facebook pro- tests in formulating and expressing socio-economic grievances and articulated anti-systemic sentiment. Due to their strong organizational structure, resources and activists' "know-how", these movements resemble Kerbo's movements of affluence. On the other hand, the 2011 Facebook protests lacked organizational structure and continuous engagement and can be seen as movements of crisis.

Addressing the debate regarding the impact of the Great Recession on changing union strategies in post-socialist Europe, our analysis shows that in Croatia and Serbia the crisis, while depressing strike numbers, was nevertheless met with substantial union resistance. Developing a paired comparison and relying on protest event data for the period 2000–2017, we argue that the differences among the two countries’ respective varieties of capitalism drive divergent union strategies described as social movement unionism. In Serbia, the role of unions in protests articulating workers’ demands remained more central and unions were overall more present in the protest arena, while in Croatia, unions have exhibited stronger propensity to forge alliances and adopt innovative policy strategies. While taking on board scholarship that portrays social movement unionism as signalling union weakness, we argue that strategies which increase union mobilization capacity may also be understood as increasing union resilience in changing social circumstances.