Annual Review of Political Science
Vol. 11: 327-349 (Volume publication date June 2008)
(doi:10.1146/annurev.polisci.11.053006.183457)
First published online as a Review in Advance on February 13, 2008
The Mobilization of Opposition to Economic Liberalization
Kenneth M. Roberts
Department of Government, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853;
email:kr99@???
Opposition to economic liberalization has intensified since the late
1990s, with Latin America often standing at the forefront of new
social and political movements that challenge market globalization.
The revival of social protest and populist or leftist political
alternatives has shattered the technocratic consensus around
neoliberal policies in the region. By demanding an expanded set of
social citizenship rights, these movements are also contesting the
terms under which popular sectors were reincorporated politically
under the new democratic regimes of the 1980s. This “second”
historical process of mass political incorporation differs in
fundamental ways from that associated with the process of labor
incorporation in the first half of the twentieth century. It is marked
by a more pluralistic set of social subjects, a more decentralized
organizational structure, and more fluid patterns of institutional
development. Existing scholarship often fails to explain variation in
the patterns of social and political mobilization, due to both
methodological and theoretical limitations—in particular, a tendency
to focus on outcomes with little variation on the dependent variable,
and a failure to engage theoretically with the literature on social
fragmentation and demobilization. There is thus a need to problematize
the process of mobilization by conducting more rigorous comparative
research on a broader range of social responses to market
liberalization.
