Some argue that we are experiencing a global shift toward a "social movement society" in which protest is a routine part of political bargaining. Postindustrialism and affluence are seen as combining with the growth of the state and neocorporatist bargaining in creating greater protest potential. We use a multilevel analysis of 41,235 respondents nested within thirty-five countries from the 1990 World Values Survey to examine this question. Net of standard controls for individual-level sources of protest potential, we find that economic affluence, state capacity, women as a percentage of the total labor force, and left corporatism contribute to greater aggregate protest potential. Ethnic grievances stemming from economic discrimination and percentage of Protestants also contribute positively while language dominance suppresses protest potential. Protest potential is an outgrowth of postindustrialism trends, the prevailing control strategy of left parties in neocorporatist states, and long-standing ethnic grievances.Discussions of contemporary protest have been dominated by microanalyses of the resources, networks, and political attitudes that contribute to protest (e.While useful, these arguments leave unaddressed the larger macropolitical and social structural contexts that lie behind the growth and mobilization of protest. Some of these studies (e.g., Crozat 1998; Ingelhart 1990) use individual-level analyses to make claims about the changing macrodeterminants of protest, a technique that fails to distinguish and separately control for individual and structural factors. Protest and the development of a "social movement society" (Meyer and Tarrow 1998) are by many accounts rooted in changes in the social structures, institutions, and political processes of contemporary societies. Arguably, they are also connected to idiosyncratic, but durable, differences among countries in political culture and sociohistorical trajectories.We address the macrodeterminants of protest by using a multilevel (or hierarchical linear model [HLM]) analysis of the protest potential measures provided in the 1990 wave of the World Values Survey. Protest potential gages the willingness of political actors to resort to unconventional forms of political action (e.g., strikes, boycotts, violence, etc.) as a means of achieving their goals. While willingness to engage in such actions does not equate with actual participation, several studies have demonstrated a strong correlation between protest potential and actual protest actions (Barnes and Kaase 1979;Crozat 1998;Jenkins and Wallace 1996;Marsh 1977;Wallace and Jenkins 1995). Although the incidence of protest participation is often contingent on contextual circumstances (e.g., immediate grievances, cooptable networks, counteractions by opponents, police actions, etc.), protest potential provides a broad and reliable societal measure of the likelihood of protest. Dalton and van Sickle (2005) show that aggregate World Values Survey measures of protest correlate positively (r = 0.51) with news-...