Keeping a roof over your head: housing and anti-debt movements in Croatia and Serbia during the Great Recession

Abstract

ABSTRACT 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.