Abstract
Economic hardship is ordinary and protest is rare, so the question is not why crises produce grievances but why so few grievances produce participation. We argue that what converts hardship into protest is the availability of an identifiable agent to hold responsible. An International Monetary Fund program is the clearest such shock, because a government publicly negotiates, signs and defends it, which fixes responsibility on a domestic actor at a datable moment. A banking or currency crisis is equally discrete and equally severe, yet it arrives without a domestic signatory. Using 850,184 respondents in 550 survey waves across 90 democracies between 1984 and 2017, we estimate linear probability models with country and survey-year fixed effects, so every comparison is between different moments in the same country. A program in the preceding year raises the probability of attending a demonstration, whereas a financial crisis of comparable severity does nothing. The effect is concentrated where the theory requires, among respondents facing no imminent national election and among those with little confidence in the institutions that would have to answer for the policy. Attribution, and not deprivation, is what an economic crisis must supply before it mobilizes.