Kathryn Hochstetler
Latin American social movements provide some of the most vivid political images in a region that does not lack for color. To give just a few examples, over a million Brazilians painted their faces black and marched to encourage their National Congress to impeach then-President Collor; Bolivian indigenous peoples gathered behind their own multi-colored flag to successively demand a change in gas policy, two presidents’ resignations, and a new constitution; and the Zapatistas transformed global understandings of what was possible in the neoliberal age with their 1994 uprising in Mexico. As these examples show, social movements have been not just present in Latin American countries, but often successful in changing the direction of political systems.
This chapter’s conceptual and empirical focus is on social movements as manifestations of contentious politics, meaning “episodic, public, collective” attempts to make claims on key decision-makers.1 Compared to other actors, social movements are among the most likely to introduce novel demands, new collective actors, and innovative modes of action to the political world, although their collective struggles can also become routine parts of political life. The association of social movements with originality has led to a great deal of analytical focus on the conditions of emergence of new movements and strategies, with secondary attention to questions about the development of social movements over time and whether they achieve their aims. Social movements also generate broader interest as indicators of the quality of more conventional political institutions and mechanisms of representation.
Social movements have been part of Latin American political history since the pre-independence period. Early movements of resistance to colonialism and the independence movements themselves are not generally called social movements, but share a familial resemblance to them and fall on the more contestatory end of the spectrum of contentious politics. This section will sketch two partially overlapping generations of more direct study of social movements in Latin America, showing the close relationship between analytical perspectives and historical developments. Scholars in an initial period (roughly 1960–1990s) used class-based analyses to explain emerging working class and revolutionary movements, while their overlapping successors (approximately 1975–present) turned to social movements theories developed in Northern countries in order to explain the proliferation of new movements that took up “smaller” topics from human rights to the environment.
In the first generation of studies, scholars documented the emergence of working-class and revolutionary movements during the first eight decades of the 20th century.2 As a group, they drew on structural theories inspired by Marxian and related macrosociological perspectives. These explained that such new movements emerged through the working out of class-based conflicts generated by economic production processes. They defined the movements’ levels of success in terms of large-scale transformations of economies, states, and societies, and saw success as depending on structural conditions that made existing elites and institutions vulnerable to the movements’ challenges. While revolutionary movements fought in half a dozen countries and labor movements hotly contested the rise of neoliberal economic policies in the 1980s in Latin America,3 that decade also ushered in a whole array of sociopolitical transitions—of democratization, to more market-oriented economies, the end of the Cold War—that made both kinds of movements less prominent afterwards.4 The predominant academic approaches in political science followed suit.
The next generation of research on social movements reflected changes in the forms of political contention that had been developing since the 1970s. The comparatively low and informal organizational requirements of the social movement form of engagement in politics introduced an astonishing array of actors, interests, and ideas to national political agendas over the next decades, and many eventually made their way into the formal political system. Small-scale movements of neighborhoods and other kinds of communities began to organize themselves to address the needs—day care, soup kitchens, solidarity, credit—that the military governments of the day were not meeting. New social movements including indigenous, environmental, and gender groups also posed demands that seemed small to the previous generation of scholars because they focused on identity and lifestyle concerns that were not seen to require remaking all of state and society.5 Yet collectively these movements represented real change in a region where the hierarchies of landownership and formal industrial production had largely organized political life. In addition, indigenous and women’s movements made demands that turned out to pose significant challenges to traditional ways of doing politics, while the whole shifting array of movements could take on very big agenda items when they managed to form cross-sectoral coalitions.6
In general, these social movements chose less-contentious tactics than earlier movements. They certainly did not routinely make the revolutionary movements’ explicit commitment to violent strategies, but collectively resolved problems for themselves or made claims for respect and inclusion. Many of their choices were not easily traceable to structural factors, and research approaches changed in turn. Researchers drew on the social movements’ theories of scholars of U.S. and European movements, which tended to highlight the agency of activists who mobilized resources, actively networked, and made their choices in the context of fluid circumstances. Theoretical debates centered on questions like whether movements were more responsive to changing political openings (“political opportunity structure”) or broader cultural practices of identity and framing.7 These debates were borrowed from the north, and the answers looked somewhat different in the Latin American context of extreme economic and social inequality and a state that was unusually (but unevenly) strong and just newly democratic.8 Much of the subsequent empirical debate has asked what those differences mean for social movements practices in the region.
The last couple of decades have seen remarkably rapid changes in Latin America. One of the most important for social movements has been the region’s economic shift to greater market control over national economies and the corresponding drop in the scope and power of states. After early consensus that this neoliberal turn was demobilizing for social movements, scholars have more recently concluded that the effects were in fact varied, and they have documented a return to the streets in a number of countries in the region. The effects of neoliberalism were mediated by a second important change, the near simultaneous transition to liberal democratic forms of government. Although the resulting regimes have often proved disappointing, they are undoubtedly more inclusive than preceding military and civilian governments. In particular, some of the sectors which arose in social movements—indigenous populations, women, leftists—have even been elected to national presidencies and are newly routine participants in the political process, creating novel opportunities and challenges for social movements. Finally, Latin Americans of many kinds are increasingly crossing national boundaries to trade products and ideas, make political coalitions, and engage in a complex web of transnational interactions. All of these developments carry important implications for social movements, and I use them here to organize a summary of some of the recent empirical debates and discoveries about Latin American social movements.
By the early 1990s, most Latin American countries had taken steps to significantly reduce the state’s role in their national economies, privatizing state-owned enterprises, reducing subsidies and other government spending, and removing barriers to free trade and market transactions. In political science, an initial generation of scholarship saw these changes as profoundly demobilizing for social movements. These “atomization” theorists9 concluded that neoliberalism was especially destructive of social movements’ capacity to mobilize, even while economic opening created painful motivations for them to protest. More recently, however, their empirical conclusions have been challenged by a set of scholars, here called “mobilization” theorists, who point out the undeniable presence of anti-neoliberal contention in at least some countries of the region. Here I compare the evidence for their empirical conclusions, and discuss the causal mechanisms each sees at work.
The pessimism of the atomization theorists began with the effects of neoliberal policies on organized labor, which suffered a double hit. On the one hand, the economic policies themselves directly reduced formal workplace employment, leaving workers economically devastated and in a defensive position vis-à-vis employers that discouraged activism.10 In addition, the economic changes came through repression (as in military Chile) or by the desertion of one-time party allies (in historically labor-mobilizing countries), both of which politically weakened labor as well. Since working-class actors have traditionally led lower-class movements and protests in Latin America, their decline meant that collective action to challenge neoliberal policies and other grievances became much more difficult to organize.11
Political developments reinforced the economic mechanisms of demobilization, in this view. The same economic policies left a diminished state that no longer controlled the resources and decision-making power that had made it a long-time target of activists.12 Citizens sought individualized solutions from the state, e.g., through new highly targeted social assistance programs, or were simply stymied by their inability to locate someone who might be able to authoritatively address their demands. The fact that essentially all political parties and presidents, even historically leftist ones, presented neoliberal proposals only deepened the sense of exclusion. In combination, these factors contributed to widespread disillusionment with democracy and a general disengagement from politics and mobilization.
In contrast, mobilization theorists have argued that neoliberal reforms did generate the kind of resistance mobilizations in Latin America that even atomization theorists say should be the result of widespread economically painful changes. They point to food riots, broad mobilizations for economic policy change, and even mass efforts to overthrow neoliberal presidents as evidence.13 For the most part, mobilization theorists explain these outcomes through a grievance model that suggests that the failure of neoliberal policies to improve economic life eventually leads citizens to challenge those policies in any way they can. When politicians are non-responsive and the state is both weak and exclusive, the street is an obvious location to make political demands. At the same time, most of these authors also stress the ways that institutional democracy provides a backdrop that allows citizens to stake political rights claims and is generally less repressive than previous military regimes.
With more than two decades of study of the relationship between neoliberalism and contestation, it is clear that there is no simple link between the two. Sorting among the evidence presented, temporal, spatial and issue dimensions all help to explain why scholars have come to such different conclusions about whether neoliberal economic policies stimulate or dampen social movements’ activity. The temporal dimension can be seen in part by examining publication dates—as a group, the mobilization theorists largely chronicled a surge of protest and other activism that marked the 2000s, while atomization arguments are grounded in the less-contentious 1990s. Spatially, the largest and most-persistent recent social movements are concentrated in just a few countries of Latin America, especially Argentina, Bolivia, and Venezuela. While social movements also exist in a number of other countries, these have seen thousands of protests, street blockades, and other acts of political contention; as each elected leftist presidents, protest spread across the political spectrum.14 Many of the case studies of particular movements focus on these most-contentious countries. Finally, the atomization theorists do appear to accurately track a decline in the traditional ways that labor has mobilized. All data report sharp drops in workplace strikes since the 1980s, although labor has continued to mobilize alongside other sectors, sometimes in a leading role. On the other hand, they appear to have missed the rise of contention in other social groupings.15 Understanding why these patterns have emerged requires further analysis.
The influence of neoliberalism on social movements is certainly affected by the simultaneous transition in much of the region to institutional democracy. Like liberalization, democratization has also garnered surprisingly opposed assessments of its likely effect on social movements. I briefly address the early expectation that liberal democratic institutions would simply replace social movements as modes of political participation, but spend most of this section discussing the ways that democratization changed both the forms and content of Latin American social movements. Democratic institutions generally allow more institutionalized forms of participation for citizens that have contributed to greater formalization of some parts of the social movement sector, like the rise of regular consultative forums and more formal citizen institutions like the non-governmental organization (NGO). To varying degrees, such opportunities for participation are associated with the more-leftist parties that have begun to flourish in recent Latin American party systems. At the same time, these developments have raised expectations among citizens that they do not necessarily meet. Democracy’s disappointments have been especially important for changing some of the content of social movements’ demands, with the absence of true citizenship becoming a common phrase for articulating what is still missing after formal political transition.
Many academic stories of the transition from military to civilian rule in Latin America focus on the elite negotiations and interests that accompanied the return to constitutional liberal democracy.16 While such bargaining undoubtedly was central in the process, others have noted that social movements—from initial small groups of mothers demanding news about their children to hundreds of thousands demanding “direct elections now!”—played an important role in communicating that military regimes had lost popular legitimacy and raising the perceived cost of repression and regime continuity.17 Elite-focused analysts did not deny social movements’ role in catalyzing transition, but their standard conclusion was well-summarized in one of the most influential studies of transition: “this popular upsurge is always ephemeral.”18
The idea that social movements would be simply displaced by institutional actors became a blindspot in a great deal of the subsequent study of Latin American politics, which simply assumes that that is true and moves on to studies of congresses and the like.19 Theoretically, this is implausible, as virtually the entire body of research on social movements is based on the experiences of social movements in the much-more-institutionalized democracies of Western Europe and North America. The evidence of social movement mobilization in Latin America presented in the last section shows that it is not empirically true in Latin America either. Thus the more relevant question is not whether social movements were able to continue in Latin America after political transition, but how democratization changed their modes of operation.
For social movements, some of the most important effects of democratic institutions derive from this regime type’s generally more favorable disposition toward organized collective action and participation on the part of ordinary citizens. Beyond the opportunity to vote that characterizes the regime type, democracies are more inclined to offer other opportunities for consultation with groups or individuals, seek the cooperation of citizens in providing government services, and are (in principle) more inclusive. These tendencies mean there is more potential for cooperation between state and society; citizens may choose confrontational strategies like protest anyway, and when they do, states are less likely to violently repress them.
To the extent that these general observations are true in Latin America (below, I discuss the governments’ frequent failures to live up to the expectations expressed here), perhaps the most novel response was the institutionalization of a part of the social movements sector in many Latin American countries, starting in the mid-1980s. Organizationally, it meant the rise of the NGO, a permanent organization with specialized staffand bureaucratic infrastructure.20 The NGO form directly contradicts many definitions of social movements, including the one that opens this chapter and includes the word “episodic.” Its very permanence and professionalism makes the NGO a preferred interlocutor for democratic governments and international actors who are looking for societal actors who can perform as cooperative partners over time, carrying out contracts and presenting accounts. These same qualities make them less openly contentious. For these reasons, both academics and activists initially saw NGOs as a threat or opposite to social movements, and some continue to do so.21 Over time, however, these debates have become less fractious, not least because the boundaries have proven to be more porous than once thought. The same individuals may show up on both sides of the divide, and classically episodic explosions of social movements often turn out to be at least partially grounded in permanent organizations, like Ecuador’s indigenous CONAIE, Argentina’s Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, or Brazil’s IBASE.22
Recent liberal democracy in Latin America has offered social movements other opportunities to have more sustained input into national politics, although these vary quite a bit among countries. The rise of political parties with close ties to social movements is one of these, noteworthy as a counter-point to the loosening of party-labor movement ties. The earliest prominent example, the Workers’ Party (PT, Partido dos Trabalhadores) in Brazil, was created in 1980 on a base of independent unions and religious, human rights, and other social movements.23 Indigenous movements embraced the partisan strategy in their new democracies, with comparative success in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela and less impact in Argentina, Guyana, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru.24 These and other newer leftist parties like Mexico’s Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD, Partido de la Revolución Democràtica) and Uruguay’s Broad Front (Frente Amplio) considered social movements part of their social base as well as electoral constituencies.25
As a group, these movement-based parties initiated many of the region’s experiments with participatory mechanisms that allow for regular consultation with citizens, not least because their social movements constituents demanded them. Some, such as the PT’s participatory budgeting process, became global exemplars.26 In other cases, the results are less impressive, such as Fox’s conclusion that the PRD did not qualitatively change rural state-society relations in Mexico, as “parties across the spectrum continue to block the democratic representation of peasants and indigenous peoples.”27 It is impossible to give a full accounting of the effect of the new parties on social movements in this chapter. On balance, they almost certainly raised or at least maintained the level of political inclusion of the actors and issues that have driven recent Latin American social movements.28 On the other hand, social movements’ expectations for their associated parties are often very high, and the compromises of both electioneering and governing rarely satisfy them. Partisan competition also entered into relations among activists.29 Ironically, the rise of leftist administrations had its most directly galvanizing effect on social movements in the diffusion of the protest tactic to the right; shut out from their historic routes into politics, landowners and traditional elites also have taken to the streets in Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, and elsewhere.30
Democratization had its final impact on social movements through the many failures of Latin American democracies to live up to the regime type’s promises. For a social movements sector that largely had its origins in the struggle against military dictatorship, these failures were dispiriting, but ultimately provoked both renewed mobilization and efforts to rethink democracy’s meaning. Throughout the region, protest continues to be the strategy of last resort for citizens who find their governments behaving unacceptably. The many elected South American presidents pushed from office early—9 of 41 between 1978 and 2003, and more afterwards—all faced mass movements insisting they go, usually for corruption and unpopular economic policies.31
Social movements’ efforts to redefine and deepen democracy have garnered fewer headlines, but are politically resonant. A number of diverse movements (and scholars of them) settled on the word “citizenship” to capture what institutional democracy still lacked.32 Citizenship meant redress for the basic inequalities and deficiencies that kept some in society from being able to be full participants in national life. Some citizenship barriers (landlessness, racism, sexism) are grounded in society and must be addressed there, but social movements directed their demands for citizenship primarily at the state. Citizenship demands essentially ask to renegotiate the terms of state-society relations, and are correspondingly contentious. Political elites have rarely responded generously, and one response among movements is to give up on the state and demand autonomy and direct control of collective decisions.33 To summarize this section, then, democratization has produced quite opposite effects, from the cooperative professional NGO to the ever-more-challenging demands for full citizenship.
The national developments discussed so far are embedded in global contexts that are increasingly important for understanding the resources, choices, and outcomes of Latin American social movements. The international level provides them with potential allies (and threats), norms to embrace or resist, and important examples of new strategies and targets for action. This may happen episodically, or take the form of tightly linked networks and coalitions that may engage in collective action across national boundaries. While not wholly new—labor joined in international networks throughout the 20th century, and many revolutionary movements found international inspiration, support, and resistance—the density of transnational relations and the extent of their reach into Latin American societies have greatly expanded. These developments find their roots in both broad socio-demographic phenomena like urbanization and the increased ease of international communications, as well as in deliberate efforts to create networks and exchange ideas.
One important role of transnational actors has been in supporting Latin American social movements that have a hard time mobilizing at home because of political or general societal rejection of their demands. Keck and Sikkink’s book on transnational activist networks laid out a highly influential model of a boomerang pattern, where activists who are stymied at home share information in hopes of finding international allies who can persuade their own governments or international organizations to target the original recalcitrant state.34 They used Latin American cases to develop their model, discussing the way transnational networks helped Argentine human rights activists and Brazilian rubber tappers to confront their own governments in the 1970s and 1980s, while Mexican human rights activists initially failed because they could not generate international allies. Similar dynamics have improved outcomes for indigenous movements and labor.35 In these examples, Latin American social movements are generally receiving help from abroad for specific campaigns.
Over time, social movements based in Latin American countries have also become protagonists in global politics in their own right. This development grew in part out of international negotiation processes, where non-state actors from around the world began to demand a more prominent role as early as the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 and the Mexico City Conference on Women in 1975. NGOs and social movements gathered to both lobby their governments and to network with each other. Latin American participants were especially committed to the latter strategy, and even formed more permanent associations with each other and like-minded organizations from the Global South.36 Such international conference participation has proved important for Latin American social movements, both for taking part in discussions that shape emerging international norms and for making concrete contacts that can lead to strategic coordination and/or new resources. For Brazilian environment and development activists, for example, the personal contacts associated with the 1992 Rio Conference on Environment Development were instrumental for both pushing and funding the transition among some of them from social movements to more-professionalized NGO forms of organization.37 International participation can also present more negative effects, introducing new kinds of competition as well as conflicts over the balance between national priorities and international agendas; Brysk uses the word “collision” to describe the impact.38
Some of the most sustained international networking has taken place on a topic where national and international activist agendas largely coincide. Social movements have built networks across the hemisphere to take on governmental integration efforts such as the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), as well as taking part in global movements against neoliberalism.39 In these networks, labor, environmentalist, human rights, and other movements have joined forces, recognizing a common aim of blocking free trade agreements. They have challenged their governments’ positions on trade at home, and showed up en masse to governmental negotiation sessions. Such networks directly forced governments to add labor and environmental protection side agreements to NAFTA and have worked together since to make those agreements more effective.40 Participants have recognized the generally “anti-” quality of many of these networks—they are against governmental and private initiatives without necessarily presenting clear alternatives—and recent initiatives have tried to set a positive agenda. Among the most influential of these is the World Social Forum, created and first hosted in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, whose purpose has been to bring together activists from around the world to share experiences and craft a democratic alternative to neoliberal policies.41
Recent research on social movements in Latin America shows many strengths. Many of the weaknesses are closely related to the strengths, however, indicating that more balanced research strategies are needed for the area of research as a whole to advance. Here I highlight several of the dominant tendencies and new research agendas that might be developed in response. I conclude with two sets of questions that push further into what democracy means for social movements in the region.
Several of the strengths/weaknesses derive from what may be the core flaw in the study of social movements, which is that the body of work is heavily skewed toward reporting positive cases. By far the most common approach is case study research of a particular movement in a particular country, with some use of comparative studies of a few movements in the same country or cross-national study of the same movement in a few countries. Within these studies, the focus is often again the close study of several key campaigns—usually campaigns where movements either succeed in their aims or lose in ways that make a political impact. These tendencies mean that the social movements’ literature is replete with rich and detailed data about successful and important mobilizations, especially by iconic movements like the 1980s Amazonian rubber-tappers, the Zapatistas in Mexico in the 1990s, or Argentina’s piqueteros who blocked roads through the 2000s. Failed and disappointing movements that have missed opportunities to mobilize rarely generate studies.42 Yet standard research design principles suggest a need to look at a fuller range of outcomes in order to understand a phenomenon. Rather than focusing so much attention on the eye-catching examples, whether movements or countries, social movements scholars might better approach their subject as, say, judiciaries are studied—present at some level in virtually every country, with the variations in strength and independence being of interest.
In a related development, many studies of social movements hew closely to the point of view of the activists. This results in part from the fact that concrete research strategies usually include extensive interviewing and observation of activists, while other data sources are less systematically used. In addition, this area of research often attracts scholars with normative commitments to the agenda of the movements they study.43 From the standpoint of studying Latin American politics as a whole, the typical approach probably overstates the importance of social movements in the phenomenon studied. Activists are excellent sources on their own presence and intentions, but evaluating impact requires more careful attention to other actors and institutions to judge their relative weight.44 The tendency for scholars to study movements with which they are sympathetic also has meant a disproportionate focus on progressive actors. In the 2000s, however, the traditional tools of social movements such as the protest march, the road blockade, and the like are being used across the political spectrum. Once again, understanding the phenomenon requires a broader view of what constitutes it.
Finally, several decades into Latin America’s most stable period of liberal democracy, we have the opportunity to rethink the relationship between social movements and democracy in more theoretical and conceptual terms. One set of questions begins with the depiction of social movements as contentious actors, whose mobilizations and tactics convey intensity of preferences—often in unorthodox ways—in a regime type that is supposed to embody (potentially conflicting) principles like representative decision-making by leaders selected by populations in elections that weight all of them equally. In this context, what are the theoretical and conceptual limits of democratic protests, and how would we recognize those empirically? Conversely, what are the theoretical and conceptual limits of the kinds of policing of protests compatible with democracy? How can political leaders balance electoral mandates with subsequent demands from the street, especially if there are mobilized counter-movements? These are questions that have received some attention in the social movements’ literature, but that have not shaped many studies of Latin American social movements so far.45
A second set of questions that deserves further research takes the opposite tack, normalizing the study of social movements (and other contentious forms of politics) as one choice on a menu of options that citizens have to influence and participate in democratic politics. This menu has expanded quite dramatically over recent decades in Latin America. It includes the traditional organizational options for interest intermediation—the social movement, the interest group, partisan options, the union.46 But citizens can also bring court cases to the region’s newly vital judicial systems, participate in a consultative process of some kind, or use international networks to set up fair trade markets. They can also just stay home. These are not exclusive strategies and citizens can choose more than one, but there are practical limits. Social movements will continue to be important in the region only if and when collective, contentious (but not too contentious) strategies make sense to potential participants in the context of these other possibilities. We know far too little about when they will.
1 Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 5.
2 A few representative works on movements of labor and other subordinate classes are Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992) and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). On revolutionary movements, see Cynthia McClintock, Revolutionary Movements in Latin America: El Salvador’s FMLN and Peru’s Shining Path (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 1998); Jeffrey Paige, Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Under-Developed World (New York: Free Press, 1975); Timothy Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1969).
3 Susan Eckstein, ed., Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).
4 The post-1990 labor movement is discussed in more detail below and in Chapter 18. No revolutionary movements of the classic type have formed since 1990, and while there may conceivably be some in the future, they “may not be our parents’ or grandparents’ revolutions …” Eric Selbin, “Resistance, Rebellion, and Revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean at the Millennium (Review Essay),” Latin American Research Review 36 (2001): 172. See also John Foran, ed., The Future of Revolutions: Rethinking Radical Change in the Age of Globalization (London: Zed Press, 2003).
5 Douglas Chalmers, et al., eds., The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America: Rethinking Participation and Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Eckstein, Power and Popular Protest; Arturo Escobar and Sonia E. Alvarez, eds., The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy, and Democracy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992); Elizabeth Jelin, ed., Women and Social Change in Latin America (London: Zed and Geneva: UNRISD, 1990).
6 Sonia E. Alvarez, EnGendering Democracy in Brazil: Women’s Movements in Transition Politics; Jane S. Jaquette, ed., The Women’s Movement in Latin America: Feminism and the Transition to Democracy (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Eduardo Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Deborah J. Yashar, Contesting Citizenship: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
7 Jean Cohen, “Strategy or Identity: New Theoretical Paradigms and Contemporary Social Movements,” Social Research 52 (1985): 663–716; Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, eds., Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
8 Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, eds., Cultures of Politics Politics of Cultures: Re-Visioning Latin American Social Movements (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996); Diane Davis, “The Power of Distance: Re-theorizing Social Movements in Latin America,” Theory and Society 28 (1999): 585–639; Joe Foweraker, Theorizing Social Movements (London: Pluto Press, 1995).
9 The atomization label comes from Moisés Arce and Paul T. Bellinger, “Low-Intensity Democracy Revisited: The Effects of Economic Liberalization on Political Activity in Latin America,” World Politics 60 (2007): 97–121.
10 Alejandro Portés and Kelly Hoffman, “Latin American Class Structures: Their Composition and Change During the Neoliberal Era,” Latin American Research Review 38 (2003): 41–82; Kenneth M. Roberts, “Party-Society Linkages and the Transformation of Political Representation in Latin America,” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 27 (2002): 9–34.
11 Marcus J. Kurtz, “The Dilemmas of Democracy in the Open Economy: Lessons from Latin America,” World Politics 56 (2004): 262–302; Philip D. Oxhorn, “Is the Century of Corporatis Over? Neoliberalism and the Rise of Neopluralism,” in What Kind of Democracy? What Kind of Market? Latin America in the Age of Neoliberalism, ed. Philip D. Oxhorn and Graciela Ducatenzeiler (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); Roberts, “Party-Society Linkages and the Transformation of Political Representation in Latin America.”
12 Davis, “The Power of Distance”; Kurtz, “The Dilemmas of Democracy”; Oxhorn, “Is the Century of Corporatism Over?”
13 Hank Johnston and Paul Almeida, eds., Latin American Social Movements: Globalization, Democratization, and Transnational Networks (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); Moisés Arce and Roberta Rice, “Societal Protest in Post-Stabilization Bolivia,” Latin American Research Review 44 (2009): 88–101; Arce and Bellinger, “Low-Intensity Democracy Revisited”; Kathryn Hochstetler and Elisabeth Jay Friedman, “Can Civil Society Organizations Solve the Crisis of Partisan Representation in Latin America?,” Latin American Politics and Society 50 (2008): 1–32; Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America; Yashar, Contesting Citizenship.
14 Kent Eaton, “Backlash in Bolivia: Regional Autonomy as a Reaction against Indigenous Mobilization,” Politics and Society 35 (2007): 71–102; Hochstetler and Friedman, “Can Civil Society Organizations Solve the Crisis of Partisan Representation in Latin America?”; Margarita López Maya and Luis Lander, “Popular Protest in Venezuela: Novelties and Continuities,” in Latin American Social Movements.
15 On labor, see Kathryn Hochstetler, “Rethinking Presidentialism: Challenges and Presidential Falls in Latin America,” Comparative Politics 38 (2006): 406; Kurtz, “The Dilemmas of Democracy”; Roberts, “Party-Society Linkages and the Transformation of Political Representation in Latin America”; Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America. On newly mobilized sectors, see the previous footnote as well as Gabriel Ondetti, Land, Protest, and Politics: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for Agrarian Reform in Brazil (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008); Yashar, Contesting Citizenship.
16 Terry Lynn Karl, “Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America,” Comparative Politics 23 (1990): 1–21; Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (4 volumes) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Dankwart A. Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model,” Comparative Politics 2 (1970): 337–363.
17 Alvarez, EnGendering Democracy in Brazil; Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman, “The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions,” Comparative Politics 29 (1997): 263–283; Jaquette, The Women’s Movement in Latin America; Enrique Peruzzotti, “Towards a New Politics: Citizenship and Rights in Contemporary Argentina,” Citizenship Studies 6 (2002): 77–93.
18 Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 55.
19 Hochstetler, “Rethinking Presidentialism”; Deborah Yashar, “Democracy, Indigenous Movements, and the Postliberal Challenge in Latin America,” World Politics 52 (1999): 76–105.
20 A number of the chapters in Chalmers et al., The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America, discuss the rise of NGOs.
21 See Kathryn Hochstetler and Margaret Keck, Greening Brazil: Environmental Activism in State and Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) for a discussion of the ways this organizational form could disrupt the field of collective action, in this case among Brazilian environmentalists.
22 Hochstetler, “Rethinking Presidentialism”; Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America.
23 Margaret Keck, The Workers’ Party and Democratization in Brazil (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
24 Donna Lee Van Cott, From Movements to Parties in Latin America: The Evolution of Ethnic Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
25 Kathleen Bruhn, Taking on Goliath: The Emergence of a New Left Party and the Struggle for Democracy in Mexico (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press); Steve Ellner and Daniel Hellinger, ed., Venezuelan Politics in the Chàvez Era: Class, Polarization and Conflict (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner 2003); Benjamin Goldfrank, “Decentralization, Party Institutionalization, and Participation,” Comparative Politics 39 (2007): 147–168.
26 Rebecca Neara Abers, Inventing Local Democracy: Grassroots Politics in Brazil (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000); Leonardo Avritzer, Democracy and the Public Space in Latin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Gianpaolo Baiocchi ed., Radicals in Power: The Workers’ Party (PT) and Experiments in Urban Democracy in Brazil (London: Zed Books, 2003); Goldfrank.
27 Jonathan A. Fox, Accountability Politics: Power and Voice in rural Mexico (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
28 This point is probably most contested in Chàvez’s Venezuela (Ellner and Hellinger, Venezuelan Politics in the Chàvez Era).
29 Alvarez, EnGendering Democracy in Brazil; Hochstetler and Friedman, “Can Civil Society Organizations Solve the Crisis of Partisan Representation in Latin America?”; Van Cott, From Movements to Parties in Latin America.
30 Eaton, “Backlash in Bolivia”; Hochstetler and Friedman, “Can Civil Society Organizations Solve the Crisis of Partisan Representation in Latin America?”; López Maya and Lander; Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America.
31 Hochstetler, “Rethinking Presidentialism,” 404; Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America.
32 Alvarez et al., Cultures of Politics Politics of Cultures; Hochstetler and Friedman, “Can Civil Society Organizations Solve the Crisis of Partisan Representation in Latin America?”; Peruzzotti, “Towards a New Politics”; Yashar, “Democracy, Indigenous Movements, and the Postliberal Challenge in Latin America.”
33 Hochstetler and Friedman, “Can Civil Society Organizations Solve the Crisis of Partisan Representation in Latin America?”; Johnston and Almeida, Latin American Social Movements; Yashar, “Democracy, Indigenous Movements, and the Postliberal Challenge in Latin America.”
34 Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998): 13.
35 Alison Brysk, From Tribal Village to Global Village: Indian Rights and International Relations in Latin America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Maria Victoria Murillo and Andrew Schrank, “With a Little Help from my Friends: Partisan Politics, Transnational Alliances, and Labor Rights in Latin America, Comparative Political Studies 38 (2005): 971–999.
36 Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Kathryn Hochstetler, and Ann Marie Clark, “Sovereign Limits and Regional Opportunities for Global Civil Society in Latin America,” Latin American Research Review 36(2001): 7–35.
37 Hochstetler and Keck, Greening Brazil.
38 Brysk, From Tribal Village to Global Village; see also Elisabeth J. Friedman, “The Effects of ‘Transnationalism Reversed’ in Venezuela: Assessing the Impact of UN Global Conferences on the Women’s Movement,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 1 (1999): 357–381; Laura MacDonald, “Globalising Civil Society: Interpreting International NGOs in Central America,” Millennium – Journal of International Studies 23 (1994): 267–285.
39 Joe Bandy and Jackie Smith, ed., Coalitions Across Borders: Transnational Protest and the Neoliberal Order (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz and William C. Smith, “Transnational Civil Society Actors and Regional Governance in the Americas: Elite Projects and Collective Action from Below,” in Regionalism and Governance in the Americas: Continental Drift (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005).
40 David Brooks and Jonathan Fox, eds., Cross-Border Dialogues: U.S.-Mexico Social Movement Networking (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers and the Center for US-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 2002).
41 Jackie Smith, Social Movements for Global Democracy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
42 Silva’s book, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America, is a positive exception and excellent model in this regard. The atomization theorists also studied the lack of mobilization but, as discussed above, saw an excessively uniform lack of mobilization. What is needed are studies of both presence and absence.
43 Whether this is seen as an inherent problem depends on the research tradition, with positivist traditions rejecting the bias in such studies while critical and interpretive traditions argue scholars need this closeness to the research subject.
44 Marco Giugni, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly, eds., How Social Movements Matter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Other research areas, such as the study of formal institutions, show a similar tendency to assume rather than demonstrate the causal centrality of their object of study.
45 Donatella Della Porta and Herbert Reiter, eds., Policing Protest: The Control of Mass Demonstrations in Western Democracies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); McAdam et al., Dynamics of Contention; Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
46 Jack Goldstone, “More Social Movements or Fewer? Beyond Political Opportunity Structures to Relational Fields,” Theory and Society 33 (2004): 333–365; Herbert Kitschelt, “Landscapes of Political Interest Intermediation: Social Movements, Interest Groups, and Parties in the Early Twenty-First Century,” in Social Movements and Democracy, ed. Pedro Ibarra (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).