TRANSITIONS TO DEMOCRACY have often been accompanied by intense political disruption. As they involve expanding political opportunities for many groups, such transitions have frequently led to a higher incidence of protests and to the emergence of more disruptive and violent forms of protest (Tarrow, 1989; Tilly, 2003). Democracies can also be expected to be more protest-prone on aggregate because they tend to bestow greater freedoms of expression on their citizens. In a large-scale quantitative analysis spanning regimes around the globe over 40 years, Przeworski et al. (2001) find that in regimes that can be characterised as democratic rather than dictatorial, strikes have historically been almost three times as frequent and demonstrations and riots almost twice as frequent. During the 1970s and 1980s many reforming countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia experienced major waves of strikes, demonstrations and riots. On a number of dimensions, Central and Eastern European countries in the early 1990s were characterised by similar structural variables as in these earlier reform cases, including rising unemployment, falling real incomes, increasing poverty rates and government subsidy cuts. Many observers thought the new post-socialist democracies were also likely to be confronted with scenarios of large-scale disruption and contention. This article indicates that, despite the above, post-socialist transitions have been comparatively peaceful in terms of strike action. It furthermore offers a critical review of some existing theoretical explanations of this puzzle, and briefly suggests directions for further research.