Protest and Democracy

Moises Arce, Roberta Rice

• Publisher: University of Calgary Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781773850450
• eBook ISBN: 9781773850481
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In 2011, political protests sprang up across the world. In the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, the United States unlikely people sparked or led massive protest campaigns from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. These protests were made up of educated and precariously employed young people who challenged the legitimacy of their political leaders, exposed a failure of representation, and expressed their dissatisfaction with their place in the aftermath of financial and economic crisis.

This book interrogates what impacts—if any—this global protest cycle had on politics and policy and shows the sometimes unintended ways it continues to influence contemporary political dynamics throughout the world. Proposing a new framework of analysis that calls attention to the content and claims of protests, their global connections, and the responsiveness of political institutions to protest demands, this is one of the few books that not only asks how protest movements are formed but also provides an in-depth examination of what protest movements can accomplish.

With contributions examining the political consequences of protest, the roles of social media and the internet in protest organization, left- and right-wing movements in the United States, Chile's student movements, the Arab Uprisings, and much more this collection is essential reading for all those interested in the power of protest to shape our world.

Part I:
CONCEPTS AND EXPLANATIONS

1

The Political Consequences of Protest

Moisés Arce and Roberta Rice

In 2011, Time magazine declared “The Protester” its person of the year. Political protests sprang up throughout 2011 in the most unlikely places. The Arab Spring protests against authoritarian rule began in Tunisia and quickly spread to Egypt and much of the Middle East. Anti-austerity protests broke out in Greece, Spain, and Portugal. In Chile, students demanded the end of for-profit education. And in the United States, the Occupy Wall Street movement brought attention to income inequality. The most unlikely individuals sparked or led these massive protest campaigns, including Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian fruit vendor; Khaled Said, an Egyptian computer programmer; and Camila Vallejo, a Chilean student organizer. The composite protester turned out to be a “graduated and precarious youth” (Estanque, Costa, and Soeiro 2013, 38). The protest actions of the so-called desperate generation revealed, in different ways, a crisis of legitimacy on the part of political actors—or a failure of political representation—inasmuch as they gave voice to widespread dissatisfaction with the state of the economy (Castañeda 2012; Hardt and Negri 2011; Mason 2013). In all cases, the protesters sidelined political parties, bypassed the mainstream media, and rejected formal organizations and traditional leadership structures. They relied instead on the Internet and local assemblies in public squares for collective debate and decision-making in an open-ended search for new democratic forms (Castells 2012).

What impact, if any, did the new global protest cycle have on politics and policies in their respective countries? Addressing this question is the central task of our volume. The objective is to advance our understanding of the consequences of societal mobilization for politics and society. The volume brings together emerging scholars and senior researchers in the field of contentious politics in both the Global North and Global South to analyze the new wave of protests relating to democratic reform in North Africa and the Middle East, the political ramifications of the economic crisis in North America, and the long-term political adjustment of Latin America after the transition toward market-oriented economic policies.

There has never been a more auspicious time for studying the relationship between protest and democracy. The so-called third wave of democracy that swept the Global South beginning in the mid-1970s has brought about the most democratic period in history (Hagopian and Mainwaring 2005; Huntington 1991). While much analytical attention has been paid to the role of protests in democratic transitions, more work is needed on protest dynamics in the era of free markets and democracy. In keeping with Goodwin and Jasper’s definition, this volume uses the term “political or social protest” to refer to “the act of challenging, resisting, or making demands upon authorities, powerholders, and/or cultural beliefs and practices by some individual or group” (2003, 3). The term “protest or social movement” refers to organized and sustained challenges. We define political change as “those effects of movement activities that alter in some way the movements’ political environment” (Bosi, Giugni, and Uba 2016, 4). The political consequences of social movements include policy, institutional, and even regime change. The global protest cycle of 2011 offered us a rare glimpse into the articulation of new issues, ideas, and desires that may have a profound impact on future political contests worldwide. They may also be the harbinger of things to come.

This introductory chapter establishes the stance of the volume. It begins by delving into the literature on the causes and consequences of the new global protest cycle. We examine the relationship between globalization and protest activity and find that by analyzing grievances, both material and ideational, and by putting them into context, we gain new insights into what might be driving contemporary protest events as well as their goals, objectives, and potential outcomes. The second section of the chapter addresses the prominent debates in the social science literature concerning the rise of protests in the context of widespread democratization and economic liberalization throughout the world. One set of arguments explores the effects of these protests on democracy, examining whether protest undermines or enhances the quality and stability of democracy. Another set of arguments studies the impact of domestic political institutions on protest, analyzing how the variation of parties and party systems in democracies channels or absorbs social unrest. Generally, these arguments emphasize the broader political environment or context in which protests unfold, thus highlighting the salience of political conditions as central to the rise of mobilizations. In the final section, we seek to advance the literature on the political outcomes of social movements by proposing a new analytical framework, one that calls for more attention to protesters’ grievances, their global linkages, and the responsiveness or “permeability” of domestic political institutions to movement demands. We conclude with an outline of the plan for the rest of the book.

Understanding the New Global Protest Cycle

Globalization can be understood as the increasing integration of national economies worldwide by means of foreign direct investment, trade liberalization, and other market-oriented economic reforms. The dominant response to the international debt crisis of the 1980s in the Global South has been a profound shift in development thinking, away from state-led, inward-oriented models of growth toward an emphasis on the market, the private sector, and trade (Nelson 1990; Willis 2005). The prevailing policy approach has generated intense disagreements within scholarly circles over whether or not it is improving or exacerbating economic well-being. Most economists agree that market reforms have increased average income levels over time (Bhagwati 2004; Lora and Panizza 2003; Walton 2004). However, critics counter that such reforms have resulted in minimal economic gains at best, and exaggerated social inequalities and poverty at worst (Berry 2003; Huber and Solt 2004; Wade 2004). The dual transition to free markets and democracy that has occurred throughout much of the developing world begs the questions: What effect has economic globalization had on protest activity? How does regime type affect this relationship?

The literature on political protest in the current democratic era is divided over whether or not economic conditions politicize or demobilize protesters.1 Scholars operating within the demobilization (or depoliticization) school of thought suggest that there has been a substantial decline in the capacity of social actors to organize and mobilize politically as a result of the problems of collective action posed by free market contexts (Agüero and Stark 1998; Kurtz 2004; Oxhorn 2009; Roberts 1998). Market reforms are argued to undermine traditional, class-based collective action and identity through a reduction in trade-union membership and the greater informalization of the workforce, thereby weakening its obvious opponents, particularly the labor movement. According to this perspective, pervasive social atomization, political apathy, and the hollowing out of democracy have become the global norm.

By contrast, and following contributions from the literature on social movements—in particular, political process theory (e.g., Tarrow 1998; Tilly and Tarrow 2006)—scholars within the repoliticization school suggest that a new global tide of protest is challenging elitist rule and strengthening democracy in the process (e.g., Arce and Bellinger 2007; Bellinger and Arce 2011; Arce and Kim 2011). To these observers, social protests appear to be occurring with greater frequency and intensity. As Simmons explains in chapter 2 of this volume, political process theory emphasizes the salience of political conditions as central to explaining the emergence and development of protest movements. Likewise, the repoliticization perspective emphasizes the importance of national-level political conditions as central to explaining anti-market mobilizations. Specifically, these conditions capture the formal dimensions of political opportunities (McAdam 1996), which allow one to examine the variation of protest activity across geography and time (e.g., McAdam 1982; Tarrow 1989).

The focus on political conditions, which originates from political process theory in general, and the formal dimensions of political opportunities in particular, downplays the role of economic conditions, such as inequality generated by economic liberalization, which existing literature portrays as the common source for mobilization (e.g., Kohl and Farthing 2006). To be clear, both the depoliticization and repoliticization schools of thought agree that these economic conditions impose severe material hardships on popular sectors, such as lower wages, employment insecurity, higher prices, cuts in social programs, and regressive land reform, among other examples. The question, then, is: What role do these economic conditions, which could also be interpreted as grievances or threats, play in mobilizing social actors? Following the depoliticization perspective, these grievances or economic-based threats all but demobilize social actors. And the presence of political conditions as put forth by democracy is not expected to revitalize protest activity.

Other authors, in contrast, argue that these grievances or threats were pivotal for the mobilization of social actors. In Silva’s analysis, for instance, episodes of anti-neoliberal contention were “Polanyian backlashes to the construction of contemporary market society” (2009, 266). And neoliberal reforms “generated the motivation—the grievances—for mobilization” (Silva 2009, 43; italics in original). Following Tilly (1978), Almeida (2007) also emphasizes the salience of negative inducements or unfavorable conditions as threats that are likely to facilitate various forms of “defensive” collective action. Harvey (2003) would characterize the claims of civil-society groups in opposition to economic liberalization as “protests against dispossession.” To some degree, these works mirror what political scientist James C. Davies called the “J-curve of rising and declining satisfactions” (Davies 1962; 1969). Davies’s theory suggests that protest will break out when conditions suddenly worsen and aggrieved groups seek someone to blame for the disturbing course of events (see Simmons, chapter 2 in this volume). The transition to a market economy implied an erosion of social citizenship rights (e.g., access to basic social services and publicly subsidized benefits), and thus made things worse for popular sectors of civil society (Almeida 2007). Similarly, the expansion of the natural resource extractive economy, as a consequence of the deepening of economic liberalization policies, entailed a greater need for water and land, and consequently it affected both urban and rural populations. Accordingly, conflicts over the extraction of natural resources have increased in Latin America in recent years (Arce 2014).

However, following political process theory (e.g., Tarrow 1998), and emphasizing the formal dimensions of political opportunities (McAdam 1996), the repoliticization perspective argues that an approach based solely on grievances—such as those generated by globalization—does not explain collective action very well. In brief, grievances are abundant, and we do not always see social movements rise to challenge them (Tarrow 1998). For this reason, as Simmons explains in chapter 2, McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald (1988) spoke of the “constancy of discontent.” Instead, political opp...

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: CONCEPTS AND EXPLANATIONS
• The Political Consequences of Protest
• How Do We Explain Protest? Social Science, Grievances, and the Puzzle of Collective Action
• Part II: MECHANISMS AND PROCESSES
• Transnational Protest: “Going Global” in the Current Protest Cycle against Economic Globalization
• Collective Action in the Information Age: How Social Media Shapes the Character and Success of Protests
• Schools for Democracy? The Role of NGOs in Protests in Democracies in the Global South
• Part III: CASES AND CONSEQUENCES
• The Ebbing and Flowing of Political Opportunity Structures: Revolution, Counterrevolution, and the Arab Uprisings
• “You Taught us to Give an Opinion, Now Learn How to Listen”: The Manifold Political Consequences of Chile’s Student Movement
• Protest Cycles in the United States: From the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street to Sanders and Trump
• Part IV: CONCLUSIONS
• Rethinking Protest Impacts
• Contributors
• Index