The right to protest is a key democratic principle and a central element of the participatory model of democracy. However, we have witnessed an increasing debate about the limits of this right, not only in backsliding democracies but also in consolidated ones, where some protests have been recently banned. But, unlike other contested democratic rights such as free speech, we do not know the extent to which the public may be willing to accept limitations of the right to protest, or the contextual factors that may drive citizens’ preferences about the boundaries of this right. In this paper we unpack the multidimensionality of protests in order to assess whether and how citizens’ may be open to curtailing this democratic right. For this purpose, we field a series of factorial vignette experiments in five European countries with different “protest cultures”: Spain, Italy, Greece, Belgium and the Czech Republic. Through these experiments we manipulate the characteristics of the protests in multiple dimensions: their main demands, popular support, and the potential negative side-effects of the protest (e.g., alterations of public order, offenses towards some groups…). These analyses indicate that citizens’ support for the right to protest is conditional on these characteristics of protests, and that these characteristics can reinforce or offset each other in important ways depending on citizens’ pre-existing attitudes. These findings are not only relevant for current debates about the limits of democratic rights, but also for the literature on citizens’ support for democracy.