Laymen and social scientists alike often believe that people are inspired to participate in political or social movements because of certain dislocating or frustrating personal experiences. The political protests of recent years have been interpreted in terms of similar ideas and formalized in five currently popular theories on the origins of political protest: status inconsistency, cumulative deprivation, relative deprivation, rising expectations, and social isolation. I review a large body of empirical evidence concerning each theory and find, at best, only limited support for them. Next I present some general reasons why the theories may be either inadequate or only partially correct. And, finally, I suggest a novel approach to the explanation and prediction of participation in political movements, portrayed in the form of a path-analytic scheme which can be employed in future empirical research.
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