Following the recent interest of bringing capitalism back into social movement studies, this article contributes to the debate with the application of new techniques for examining the dynamics of social class in protest politics. Questioning the declining importance of labour mobilisation in the recent anti-austerity cycles of protest in eastern Europe, I draw on a unique protest event dataset to propose a new way of exploring the relations between social class, repertoires and claimmaking. I show that this innovation can bring greater clarity to a systematic analysis of social class politics in the protest arena. The empirical exploration highlights that more than one-third of the protest events in Bulgaria and Slovenia in the aftermath of the financial crisis were driven by specific social class actors. The article suggests that, contrary to individual-level data, social class can be observed through the basic conceptions of workers and independents; and then through site and sector: production; services; and socio-cultural. These typologies help in understanding where mobilisations arise, under what conditions and for what demands.

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This article aims to present findings from an original dataset on collective action in the protest arenas of Bulgaria and Slovenia in the aftermath of the global economic crisis, 2009-2017. Unlike other empirical studies which focus either on particular social movements or individual-level measurements, this dataset consists of all reports of collective action in the form of protests demonstrations, strikes, blockades, occupations, sit-ins, marches, petitions etc., derived from the national Bulgarian and Slovenian press agencies, including information about claims and actors. Along with a description of the data collection, techniques, and coding, the article identifies the phases of protest cycles and explores general protest patterns. The findings depict three distinct periods of activity in Bulgaria and Slovenia: the ascending phase of protest cycle involving immediate protest responses against austerity measures (2009-2011), massive anti-establishment discontent involving the dominant role of new informal protest movements (2012-2013), and the de-mobilization phase of mass protest and the rise of contention about cultural issues (since 2014).

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The article presents one of the traditional methods in the social sciences for the research and explanation of long-term historical processes such as revolutions, riots, uprisings, protest cycles and waves – the analysis of the collective events. The steps in collecting and coding a quantitative database, the types of sources, procedures, techniques and potential biases are discussed. The application of the method in historical science is illustrated by Sidney Tarow's study of the protest cycle in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. The end of the article contains some of the most popular publicly available databases for collective mobilizations in different historical periods and describes possible directions for historical research.