This article traces the on-the-ground mobilization and recruitment strategies of Ukraine’s radical right party, Svoboda (Freedom) in the years prior to its 2012 electoral breakthrough. Ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with Svoboda party leaders and activists in Galicia show how party leaders strategically created an organizational structure aimed at recruiting young people, making linkages with pre-existing nationalist groups, and shifting the ideological focus away from cultural and toward economic issues. Interviews with party activists reveal how personal networks were key in the recruitment and radicalization process, showing that radical right activists were radicalized, or “made,” through political participation. Consequently, Svoboda’s organizational capacity allowed the party to take advantage of a political opportunity — Yanukovych’s unpopularity and weakened national democratic parties — in the 2012 parliamentary elections.

This article uses a mixed-methods approach to analyze the relationship between television and protest during East Germany’s revolution. The content of television newscasts, both West German and East German, is analyzed together with protest event data. There are two key findings. First, West German coverage of protests is associated with an increase in protest in the first phase of the revolution. This finding emerges from time series analysis. Second, West German and East German television coverage were interacting, with the latter reacting to the former. This finding emerges from both quantitative and qualitative analysis.

The article assesses civil society in Putin’s Russia through the lens of the small social movement working against gender violence. Based on questionnaires distributed to movement organizations in 2008–2009, we find significant retrenchment among the NGO segment of the movement, adding evidence to the claim of Russia’s turn toward authoritarianism. However, this innovative, midlevel analysis–not the typical society-wide surveys nor the small number participant observation–also shows that the women’s crisis center movement has made some in-roads in transforming the state, revealing that some democratic opportunities remain at the local level.

The goal of this paper is to analyse the impact the EU has had on Czech women’s groups since the1990s. Drawing on both Europeanization and social movement theories, the first section defines the theoretical framework of the paper. The second section is focused on the impact of changes in the funding of women’s groups which, since the end of the1990s, have relied more than before on European funding. The third section analyses the shift in the political context and the domestic political opportunity structure in the Czech Republic that has occurred in connection with the accession process. The fourth section analyzes transnational cooperation for which new opportunities have appeared with the EU’s eastward expansion. The paper concludes by summarizing its main findings.