https://doi.org/10.1177/02685809211068664 International Sociology 1–18 © The Author(s) 2022 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/02685809211068664 journals.sagepub.com/home/iss Cognition and protest in democratic and authoritarian regimes, 1981–2020 Olga Lavrinenko Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland Abstract Whereas most theories of why the masses protest in democratic and authoritarian regimes involve some psychological or ‘cognitive’ element, major theories that include them (a) de- emphasize the structural conditions and (b) posit an explicit structure and cognition model but lack data to test its propositions across nations and time. This article synthesizes cognition- themed theories of democratic culture, political process theory’s cognitive liberation, and the structural cognitive model’s incentives. I test this synthetic theory in a specific way: that democratization and social spending interact with cognition in terms of external political efficacy and support for equitable economic redistribution to increase protest potential. I employ a three-level cross-national time-series model on the World Values Survey/European Values Study integrated dataset (1981–2020), consisting of democratic and authoritarian-leaning countries. I find that the three cognitive theories are complementary and that the interaction of structural changes with micro-level cognition has nuanced associations with protest potential. Keywords Cognition, democracy, efficacy, protest, social spending Many theories of why the masses protest in democratic and authoritarian regimes involve some psychological or ‘cognitive’ element. One major theory is about democratic cul- ture, in which cognition refers to the masses’ desire for freedom, for example, ‘emanci- pative values’ (Kirsch and Welzel, 2019; Welzel, 2013). In democracies, the desire for freedom leads people to support and agitate for democracy via protest. In authoritarian Corresponding author: Olga Lavrinenko, Faculty of Political Science and International Studies, the University of Warsaw, Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28, 00-927 Warsaw, Poland. Emails: o.lavrinenko2@uw.edu.pl; lavrinenko.olga@gmail.com 1068664ISS 0 0 10.1177/02685809211068664International SociologyLavrinenko research-article 2022 Article