Breaking the mold: the changing modularity of protest forms during cycles of contention

One crucial decision that every group of protesters needs to make concerns the forms of action through which they want to convey their claims. While repertoires of contention can vary greatly across different sociopolitical contexts, we know little about why some protest forms may acquire or lose prominence within the same polity over relatively short periods. By applying a novel multimodal network analysis framework to an original protest event dataset covering political contention in Spain between 2007 and 2014 during the Great Recession, this research explores how the modularity of protest forms-that is, their transferability to different circumstances of contention-evolves in the short term. Our analyses demonstrate that the repertoire of contention becomes more flexible as the cycle unfolds, while political opportunities present weak and asymmetric effects on the transferability of different tactics, refining expectations from classic theories of contentious politics in several important ways.