1 Why Do People Protest? Comparing Demonstrators’ Motives Across Issues and Nations Stefaan Walgrave Jeroen Van Laer Joris Verhulst Ruud Wouters Political protest is on the rise. The number of people signing petitions, boycotting products or participating in demonstrations has risen in almost all countries (Norris 2002). The protest surge raises questions about the motives of these ever more frequent protesters. Why do people protest? The literature has dealt extensively with this topic. The motives of protesters, or political participants, are one of the main strands in the literature on social movements (in sociology) and political participation (in political science). This literature shows several weaknesses. First, the field appears to be scattered theoretically. The literature on protest motivations is dispersed over several research programs and motivational aspects of participation are dealt with using different concepts such as framing, emotions, grievances, networks etc. Also, the literature on social movements is mostly based on case-studies. Scholars have studied in detail what drives and motivates participants in a specific protest event or in a particular protest cycle (see for example: McAdam 1988). Comparative studies comparing participants’ motivations in different countries and across different issues are rare (but see: Klandermans 1993; Van Stekelenburg 2006) which limits the possibility of generalization. Finally, in terms of protest motivations’ measurement and operationalization, the available studies have mainly used non-systematic and non-standardized methods. Focused on scrutinizing specific reasons to participate in a specific event or movement and not on comparing across events or movements, standardization has not been a particular strength of these studies. This paper tackles these problems. We propose a theoretical typology of motivations to participate in protest, we compare the motivations of participants in protest events across issues and nations, and we measure motivations in a standardized and systematic way. Our theoretical typology of protest motives is straightforward and simplifies existing work. We distinguish four types of motivation structured along two dimensions: instrumental versus expressive and individual versus collective motives. We argue that the four basic types created by these two dimensions capture the lion’s share of motives people may have to participate in protest. Our study is comparative as it compares the motivations of thousands of participants in protest demonstrations on different issues and in different nations. We rely on a series of twelve protest surveys fielded in four countries and pertaining to eight different protest issues. We claim that the motives of participants are contextually determined. What type of motive drives a protester partially depends on his or her individual features but also on the issue at stake and the type of movement involved. Finally, our measurement of motives is simple but systematic. Motives are explicit, conscious and verbalized reasons to participate. We asked participants in the twelve demonstrations the same open question: “Why are you participating in this protest demonstration?” We consider the answer to this question as a good indicator of people’s motives.