Considering the Orange legacy: patterns of political participation in the Euromaidan Revolution

The proximity of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004) andEuromaidan Revolution (2014) provides an opportunity to considerwhy some individuals remain active across protest cycles whileothers defect. Many social movement scholars explain differentialparticipation in terms of micro-structural, biographical, or cognitivefactors. Others rely on rational choice theories of collective actionbased on coordination. Testing competing explanations arecomplicated because the variables included in structural andagency-based models are often the same, although the underlyingcausal mechanisms are different. In this article, I argue that thekey to understanding the role of agency and structure in protestparticipation is to relax strong assumptions about the unified natureof society and consider the multiple paths to participation. Thisapproach suggests that both structural and agency-based causalmechanisms can influence political engagement depending onindividual experiences, identities, and perceptions of events.