Competitiveness, Partisanship, and Subnational Protest in Argentina

• Author: Jorge Mangonnet,Moisés Arce
• DOI: 10.1177/0010414012463888
• Published date: 01 August 2013
• Date: 01 August 2013
• Subject Matter: Articles

463888CPS46810.1177/0010414012463888Com
parative Political StudiesArce and Mangonnet
© The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission: http://www.
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
Article
Comparative Political Studies
46(8) 895 –919
Competitiveness,
© The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
Partisanship, and
DOI: 10.1177/0010414012463888
cps.sagepub.com
Subnational
Protest in
Argentina
Moisés Arce1 and Jorge Mangonnet2
Abstract
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 ex-
plores 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 demon-
strates 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.
Keywords
political competition, partisanship, subnational protest, Argentina
1University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA
2Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina
Corresponding Author:
Moisés Arce, University of Missouri, Department of Political Science, 314 Professional Building,
Columbia, MO 65211-6030, USA.
Email: arcem@missouri.edu

---

896
Comparative Political Studies 46(8)
Following Latin America’s third democratic wave that began in 1978, much of
the scholarly literature anticipated that conflicts involving society would be
resolved through parliamentary institutions that evoke compliance among the
relevant political forces. However, starting in the 1990s several Latin Ameri-
can countries began to experience a generalized rise in various new forms of
political protest. These protests were effective in rolling back unpopular eco-
nomic policies, such as privatizations of natural resources, government utili-
ties, pension systems, and social services. Waves of street protests also forced
presidents who supported market policies to leave office early.
Prior research on the rise of protest activity has emphasized the impor-
tance of democracy as an intervening variable affecting the relationship
between economic liberalization and protest activity (e.g., Almeida, 2009;
Arce & Kim, 2011) and further shown that the quality of institutional repre-
sentation shapes collective action in the streets (e.g., Arce, 2010; Machado,
Scartascini, & Tommasi, 2009). On average, citizens in countries with strong
and well-institutionalized parties are less likely to resort to protest as a mech-
anism to achieve political objectives or express policy demands compared to
citizens in countries with weak and poorly institutionalized parties. These
explanations, however, largely dwell on cross-national comparisons and, as
such, suffer from two related limitations. First, it is widely known that insti-
tutional structures vary far more across countries than they do within coun-
tries. Therefore, an institutional explanation is less theoretically compelling
for countries stagnated by weak institutions. Second, variation in patterns of
mobilization across subnational boundaries is abundant (Murillo & Ronconi,
2004; Wilkinson, 2004). This forces us to ask the following: What political
factors account for the subnational unevenness of popular contention? Why
do apparently similar subnational units within the same national democratic
regime have different levels of protest?
Our article focuses on Argentina, which represents an ideal setting to
explore these questions for two reasons. First, based on recent public opinion
data (Lodola & Seligson, 2011, p. 179), Argentina currently sustains the high-
est rates of protest participation in Latin America. The incidence of protest
also varies considerably within the country (Delamata, 2002; Favaro, Iuorno,
& Cao, 2004). Second, the country has been recently portrayed as a case of
widespread institutional weakness (Levitsky & Murillo, 2005), and parties
and protest activity have become increasingly intertwined in the present dem-
ocratic period. Hence, an analysis of the political factors that shape protest
activity in Argentina sheds light on similar processes elsewhere in the region.
To explain Argentina’s cycle of popular contention, and seeking to cor-
rect the analytical bias of the existing literature in favor of cross-national

---

Arce and Mangonnet
897
comparisons, we draw attention to the electoral and partisan dynamics that
make subnational provinces more protest prone. As Gibson and Suarez-Cao
(2010, p. 29) write, the country is “a mosaic of distinctive provincial political
regimes,” where political competition and the powers of provincial political
actors vary considerably. Therefore, our sample includes Argentina’s 23 prov-
inces and the city of Buenos Aires for the period from 1993 to 2005. This time
frame under investigation begins with the violent unrest in the northwestern
province of Santiago del Estero (also known as the Santiagazo riots), which
marked the beginning of the spiral of protest in the Argentine interior prov-
inces, and concludes with the first 3 years of the Néstor Kirchner presidency,
whose successful government policies diminished social conflict following
the collapse of the country’s Convertibility Plan.
Our main empirical results demonstrate that the electoral incentives cre-
ated by shifting patterns of political competition and the nature of partisan
opposition influence the spatial and temporal distribution of subnational pro-
test activity. These results show that political competition in general and par-
tisanship in particular still matter, even in a period when representative
institutions have been discredited because of poor government stewardship
and corruption scandals. After providing background information on
Argentina’s most recent cycle of protest, we summarize the data and methods
used in the article. We then present our empirical findings. The last section
concludes by suggesting new areas of research on the repoliticization of pro-
test activity after Latin America’s third democratic wave.
Protest in Argentina After
Economic Liberalization
Popular contention has played a major role in key political developments in
Argentina. Prior to the country’s transition to democracy, which began in
1983, popular mobilizations ushered in coups and brought cohesiveness to
military regimes, as in the junta of Jorge Rafael Videla in 1976. Protest also
led to the collapse of these regimes, as in the mobilizations during the early
1970s that restored civilian rule and brought Argentina’s historical leader
Juan Domingo Perón back into power. During the present democratic period,
the implementation of economic reform policies under President Carlos
Menem (1989–1999) triggered a sustained wave of antimarket contention
(Silva, 2009). Most observers agree on three founding episodes of conten-
tion: the 1993 Santiagazo riots, which initiated the wave of protest in the
Argentine interior provinces; the 1996 mobilizations in the province of
Neuquén that led to emergence of the unemployed piqueteros (or picketers);

---

898
Comparative Political Studies 46(8)
and finally the massive protests that began in the province of Corrientes in
1999 and culminated in the city of Buenos Aires in December 2001, against
the then president Fernando De la Rúa (1999–2001). Persistent protests trig-
gered a string of presidential resignations, a total of four starting with De la
Rúa, and popularized the slogan que se vayan todos (“throw everyone out”).
As a result of these episodes of contention, Argentine democracy has been
widely recognized as a true landscape of collective insurgency and ground-
breaking repertoires of popular contention (Auyero, 2001). Attacks on gov-
ernmental buildings and politicians’ houses, national and provincial road
blockades, banging pots and pans, and setting up camps at civic squares, soup
kitchens, and popular assemblies have all epitomized what Peruzzotti (2001,
p. 141) characterized as the productive “politicization” of the country’s civil
society. This cycle or wave of popular contention, which originated as a con-
sequence of economic liberalization policies, has also introduced new pat-
terns of claim making and produced formal and informal arenas of political
bargaining in a widespread context of democratic political competition and
economic change. The enduring contentious phenomenon in Argentina is
particularly striking in view of the literature that formerly regarded the nation
as a paradigm of party system institutionalization (Mainwaring & Scully,
1995) and democratic consolidation (Schamis, 2002).
In this cycle of protest, road and street blockades are considered the most
salient form of protest activity (Svampa & Pereyra, 2003). Starting with the
1993 Santiagazo riots, well-known episodes of roadblocks have occurred in
the provinces of Río Negro (1995), Neuquén (1996), Jujuy (1997), Corrientes
(1999),...