Suchergebnisse

Why do targets of social movement activities respond to movements in the ways they do? Many factors play a role in shaping targets' responses to social movement activities. This article focuses on one particular factor: targets' perceptions of social movement claims. The article argues that a target's understanding of a social movement's claims helps shape its response, which, in turn, shapes the evolution of the social movement. Two cases of social mobilization, one in response to water privatization in Bolivia and the other in response to rising corn prices in Mexico, serve as a lens through which to explore these issues. In each case, differences in how public authorities understood the movements' claims help explain why they reacted in starkly different ways to the emerging movements. Where officials appreciated the symbolic value of the good at stake, they acted quickly to curtail resistance. Where officials failed to grasp those meanings, they dismissed the potential for widespread mobilization and inadvertently accelerated movement growth.

Responses to the imposition of market-oriented economic policies have varied. This article asks two questions: (1) How can we better understand when marketization will or will not prompt resistance? And (2) when people do mobilize, why are some movements broad-based while others draw on particular segments of society? The author argues that these questions can best be answered by focusing not only on the political contexts and resources available to potential social movements, but also on what is perceived to be at stake during marketization. These perceptions influence mobilization processes and the kinds of groups available for mobilization. When people understand markets as threatening to material wellbeing, as well as to widely shared community relationships, understandings, and commitments, heightened feelings of group belonging can contribute to broad-based mobilization. The author develops this argument through analysis of the broad-based, widespread movement that emerged to protest water privatization in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 1999 and 2000. In the context of a history of agriculture, irrigation, drought, and conflict, water helped to produce and reproduce imagined communities of nation, region, and ethnic group, as well as quotidian communities revolving around the routine production and consumption of water. These meanings help to explain the dynamics of the resistance that emerged.

Democracy forces political elites to compete for power in elections, but it also often presses them to share power after the electoral dust has settled. At times these powersharing arrangements prove so encompassing as to make a mockery of putative partisan differences, and even to wipe out political opposition entirely by bringing every significant party into a 'party cartel.' Such promiscuous powersharing arrangements undermine representation by loosening parties' commitments to their core constituents, and threaten accountability by limiting voters' capacity to remove parties from power via the ballot box. In the otherwise deeply disparate cases of Indonesia and Bolivia, the origins of promiscuous powersharing can be traced to similar periods of high political uncertainty surrounding crisis-wracked transitions to democracy. Party elites coped with the uncertainties of transition and crisis by sharing executive power across the country's most salient political cleavages. These arrangements forged an elitist equilibrium grounded in informal norms and networks, allowing collusive democracy to outlast the uncertain crisis conditions in which it was forged. Yet they have ultimately proven self-undermining by triggering distinctive popular backlashes, returning both countries to the political uncertainty that promiscuous powersharing was initially intended to alleviate. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]