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This article analyzes novel patterns of interaction between right-wing parties and protest movements during major contentious cycles in Argentina (2012–13) and Brazil (2013–16), which preceded the advent of the Cambiemos coalition in the former and the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in the latter. Drawing on a dual process-tracing strategy and a wide range of data sources, this study shows that these interactions are central to understanding why and how right-wing parties leverage novel repertoires and resources from digital activists during contemporary protest cycles, a dynamic conceptualized as a new party linkage strategy through digital intermediation. The study traces its three-phase development in both countries, revealing how differences in institutional contexts and the strength of activist groups contributed to divergent trajectories of partisan opposition toward the end of the cycles, regarding both the subsequent reconfiguration of the right and the entry of digital activists into institutional arenas.

The metaphor of “repertoire” is increasingly used in the study of contention to convey the fact that people act collectively through a limited set of cultural routines. Yet despite its broad adoption, the term is loosely defined and rarely subject to empirical verification. This has led to unfruitful scholarly disputes, with most perspectives assuming that change in repertoires is independent from how actors perform them. Drawing a parallel between the dynamics of repertoire performance and jazz improvisation, I propose a pragmatist definition of repertoires, understood as relational sets of collective practices that become routinized as habit-sets and become a baseline for innovation when actors face puzzling situations. I then provide a theoretical model for analyzing change in contentious repertoires, which relies on the study of the co-constitutive relation between tactical affordances, actors’ strategies and identities, and contexts. I illustrate this model with three secondary cases of unexpected tactical innovation.

The June Days protests (Jornadas de Junho) constituted the most significant protest cycle in contemporary Brazilian history. Between June and July 2013, millions of people mobilized across more than 400 cities in the country, numbers only comparable in breadth and scope to the mobilizations against the military regime in 1984 and the protests demanding the impeachment of President Collor de Melo in 1994. While the protests were initially triggered in response to a relatively small rise in public transportation fares in the city of São Paulo, local states' repression soon led to a national escalation of conflict. The scope of grievances expanded rapidly, spanning the state's long‐standing mismanagement of public services – education, health, housing, environmental issues – the defense of sexual and racial minorities' rights, the denunciation of political corruption, and demands for fiscal reform. This manifold set of grievances was accompanied by increasing hostility against political parties and deepened political polarization, making political elites' responses fall short of protesters' expectations.

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