‘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.

Advocacy NGOs in Croatia often emphasize their nonpartisan identity, meaning‎that they do not publicly associate with political parties or declare their‎endorsement of electoral candidates. While such NGOs’ behavior could be‎explained based on overall negative public perception of political parties, as‎well as funding conditions imposed by NGOs’ donors, this article argues that‎the continuous nonpartisan identity of advocacy NGOs is further reaffirmed‎by a specific civil society discourse. Drawing on the analysis of in-depth interviews‎with senior members of nine Croatian NGOs, active in areas of human‎rights, the rule of law, and education, three relevant themes of civil society‎discourse reaffirming NGOs’ nonpartisanship are outlined: (1) idea of civil‎society as an answer to malfunctioning state, (2) NGOs’ legitimation based‎on autonomy and expertise, and (3) perception of political parties as an inherently‎limiting organizational form.‎

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