Research has shown that countries with weak institutions are more likely to experience higher levels of protest as a means to achieve political objectives or express policy demands. A growing body of literature portrays Argentina as a case of widespread institutional weakness, and the country currently sustains the highest rates of protest participation in Latin America. However, existing literature has yet to explain why apparently similar subnational units within the same national democratic regime experience different levels of protest. By moving down to a subnational level of analysis, this article explores the political factors that shape protest activity across the country’s 23 provinces and the city of Buenos Aires for the period 1993–2005. It demonstrates that the electoral incentives created by shifting patterns of political competition and the nature of partisan opposition influence the spatial and temporal unevenness of subnational protest activity.

This article investigates the effect of local economic conditions on voting behavior by focusing on the export-oriented agricultural areas of Argentina during the commodities boom. It assesses the marginal effect of export wealth on electoral outcomes by studying the impact of soybean production, the main Argentine export product during this period. The combination of rising agricultural prices and a salient national tax on exports allows us to evaluate how wealth and tax policy shape local electoral behavior. This study relies on a spatial econometric analysis of the vote across Argentine departments for the 2007–15 period, along with qualitative evidence from interviews and a descriptive analysis of government appointments.

Artículos CienCia PolítiCa ArgentinA: el protAgonismo de los votAntes y lA AlternAnciA electorAl* 1

Whereas the scholarship on rural contention mostly focuses on austerity and busts, we study protests by agricultural export producers in times of high agricultural prices. Aware of price volatility, farmers seek to take advantage of cycles’ upswings to maximize their income and resist sharing the rents generated by higher prices. When farmers lack the formal political influence to avert redistribution, they are more likely to protest as their tax burden increases although they benefit from higher prices. Their strongest protest tool is lockouts, which halt commercialization activities and have significant economic consequences, but require coordination by farmer associations. Membership homogeneity and lower exposure to state retaliation by these organizations heightens contention. We test this argument using a local-level data set on rural lockouts across Argentine departments between 2003 and 2013, a time of high prices for Argentina’s key export commodity: soybeans. We complement our empirical strategy with in-depth, semi-structured elite interviews.

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