The uprisings, protests, and campaigns against economic reforms emerged as a global pattern over the past 45 years. Since the mid-1970s, major protests have erupted every year in multiple countries over some form of government austerity measures. Scholars group such measures into a family of like-minded policies that include a wide range of governmental actions, including: subsidy cuts to lower- and middle-class groups, wage freezes, price increases, massive layoffs, regressive taxation, deregulation, privatization, and free trade. Because economic-based protests are some of the largest and most common forms of contention, their causal determinants and political consequences offer important insights to the dynamics of collective action in general.