Protest and Democracy in Latin America’s Market Era

Abstract

Existing studies hold that Latin America's market turn has had a demobilizing effect on collective political activity despite the presence of democracy. However, recent work has documented the revival of protest in the region, emphasizing the repoliticization of collective actors in the wake of economic liberalization, especially when democracy is present. This article expands the theoretical scope of the repoliticization perspective, providing the most comprehensive test of the demobilization and repoliticization hypotheses to date. Using time-series data from seventeen Latin American countries, the article confirms the repoliticization view by showing that protest increases with economic liberalization in democratic settings.

Inequality, Distributive Justice and Political Participation: An Analysis of the Case of Chile

“…Arce and Bellinger () examine the political impact of economic liberalisation and observe that in the context of open and democratic political systems, these reforms have led to a significant increase in political protests but have not significantly influenced electoral participation (Arce and Bellinger, ). In a later study that explores this observation in more depth, the authors state that economic reforms in democratic contexts have effectively repoliticised citizens, stimulating their collective will to mobilise as a means of resisting or modifying policies that adversely affect their lives (Bellinger and Arce, ). In addition, Machado et al () note that in regions characterised by weak institutions, non‐conventional means of expressing preferences, such as protests, are more attractive to citizens.…”

Neoliberal reform and protest in Latin American democracies: A replication and correction

“…3 In light of this finding, the fact that β 3 and β 5 are estimated to be positive and statistically significant reveals only that more liberalizing reform in democracies and semidemocracies did not have the negative association with protest that it did in autocracies, not that it served as a focal point for the formation and mobilization of collective actors as the repoliticization theory would have it. We, of course, are more directly interested in the effect of economic reforms on the number of protests, not on the log of protests and, as noted above, the latter is the quantity estimated by the negative binomial regression employed in Bellinger and Arce (2011). Figure 2 presents the number of protests in autocracies, semidemocracies, and democracies predicted by the four models across the observed range of economic liberalization when all other variables are fixed at their mean values.…”

“…It speaks, in other words, to the question of which side of Polanyi's (1944) 'double movement' has gained the upper hand across the region (see, e.g., Roberts, 2008). Bellinger and Arce (2011), in their article entitled 'Protest and democracy in Latin America's market era', provide the broadest empirical examination yet conducted on this question, examining the impacts of economic liberalization on protest in seventeen Latin American countries from 1970 to 2003. It argues for the second view outlined above, the repoliticization thesis, maintaining that grievances resulting from economic liberalization provide strong framing opportunities for diverse social actors to overcome their collective action problems and that, in the favorable political opportunity provided by democracy, the result will be more protest.…”

State‐targeted grievances and resources: Protest participation during economic downturns in Latin America

“…However, we still know little about whether and under what conditions grievances influence individuals' protest participation during economic downturns. Whereas most area specialist analyze protest phenomena at the aggregate level (e.g., Arce & Bellinger, 2007; Bellinger & Arce, 2011; Kurtz, 2004; Ortiz & Béjar, 2013; Zarate Tenorio, 2014), individual‐level studies have not systematically examined grievances as a major source of protest participation under times of economic downturns (e.g., Machado, Scartascini, & Tommasi, 2011). Moreover, the existing comparative research on the effect of the recent economic crisis on individuals' participation in protest is either focused on European countries (e.g., Bernburg, 2015; Grasso & Giugni, 2016; Kern, Marien, & Hooghe, 2015; Rüdig & Karyotis, 2014), or on single case studies of protests in other regions of the world (e.g., Gilad, Alon‐ĂŘBarkat, & Braverman, 2016; Mueller, 2013).…”