🧭 What This Paper Tests:

Political protest is commonly explained by three factors: resources, grievance, and values. While resources are widely regarded as important, the roles of grievance and values are debated. Theoretical expectations for middle-development societies predicted that grievance (discontent) might spur protest because resource barriers are not prohibitive, whereas emancipatory values would have limited effect given only incipient value change in developing countries.

🧾 Survey Evidence from Seven Countries:

Analyses use the sixth wave of the World Values Survey focusing on Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay to examine predisposition to protest across these middle-development Latin American societies.

📌 Key Findings:

• The expected centrality of resources is confirmed: mobilization depends on the presence and activation of resources.
• Values matter for protest participation: variation in emancipatory or mobilizing values helps explain who takes part.
• Contrary to the hypothesis that grievance would explain protest in intermediate-development contexts, grievance (discontent alone) proved irrelevant as an explanatory factor in this regional sample.

🔍 Why This Matters:

These results challenge the view that discontent by itself drives protest in middle-development Latin American countries. Instead, both the availability and mobilization of resources and the distribution of political values shape protest participation. This has implications for how scholars understand recent protest cycles in the region and for analysts considering the conditions under which grievances translate (or fail to translate) into collective action.