Publications by Type: Journal Article

In the 1990s and early 2000s, government privatization and austerity programs served as the cornerstone of free market reforms implemented throughout the developing world. The selling off of government utilities, resources, and services laid the groundwork for a highly contested battleground in the global South over social and economic distribution. This study examines the sequencing of campaigns against neoliberal reforms in Central America. Two successful movement campaigns against privatization in El Salvador and Costa Rica followed failed collective attempts to impede similar economic reforms. The policy outcomes against neo-liberal measures are explained by the path-dependent nature of the organizing templates activists chose to employ and the breadth of social movement unionism achieved. The article offers insights into similar battles currently waged in the third world over the pace of economic globalization and the conditions in which oppositional movements are likely to succeed or fail.

Purpose – This study identifies the multiple contributions of the Salvadoran women’s movement in sustaining mass mobilization under the threat of public health care privatization.Methodology/approach – A case study methodological approach shows how the emergence of an autonomous women’s movement in El Salvador in the late 1980s and early 1990s ‘‘spilled over’’ (Meyer & Whittier,1994) to assist in the maintenance of the health care campaigns in the late1990s and early 2000s.

The paper addresses a core question in the literature on states and political challenges from excluded social classes: how is large-scale collective action possible against repressive governments in the global periphery? Using the case of El Salvador’s 1932 peasant-worker uprising, the paper contributes to theories of organizational expansion and radicalization in nondemocratic settings. The case study suggests that periods of regime liberalization deposit organizations in civil society that persist beyond the political opening in the system. Combining historical materials with logistic and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), it is found that the political threats constituting liberalization reversals provide negative incentives for surviving reform-minded organizations to attempt revolutionary forms of collective action in more hostile political environments.

In the current wave of defensive collective action across Latin America in response toneoliberal globalization, working-class groups appear most frequently in the documentedprotest events. The new wave of popular movement activity emerged in the region in thelate 1990s and early twenty-first century and is driven by the erosion of the economicand social benefits previously available to the popular classes during the period of stateleddevelopment.

Examinamos tres campañas contra la puesta en pr\ actica de las pol\ ıticas neoliberales de la segunda fase en Am\ erica Central para determinar mejor los diferentes tipos de situaciones en las cuales los movimientos que desaf\ ıan las reformas inducidas por la globalizaci\ on, influyen en el avance y el car\ acter del proceso de implementaci\ on de la pol\ ıtica

What accounts for the varying outcomes of popular struggles that contest the character and content of neoliberal reforms throughout the developing world? We examine three campaigns against the implementation of second-phase neoliberal policies in Central America to better assess the kinds of situations in which movements challenging globalization-induced reforms influence the pace and character of the policy implementation process.

The article focuses on varying protest intensities of social movement activistsin an authoritarian political environment. Drawing on a sample ofparticipants in El Salvador’s El movimiento popular, the paper examineshow structural location in the resistance movement’s multi-sectoral organizationalinfrastructure shapes the level of participation. Those motivatedby state repression and maintaining multiple or cross-sectoralorganizational ties exhibited higher levels of protest participation. Thefindings suggest that more attention be given to how the multi-sectoralnetwork structure of opposition coalitions induces micro-mobilizationprocesses of individual participation in high-risk collective action.

This study examines the role of loosely-coupled state actor-social movement coalitions in creating positive policy outcomes. It specifies the organizational locations within the state most conducive to state actor-social movement ties. Using the case of Japanese anti-pollution politics between 1956 and 1976, we demonstrate that favorable policy outcomes were the result of multiple coalitions between anti-pollution movements and stateagencies, opposition political parties, local governments, and the courts.

We compare activist-based internet data with four other media sources—Lexis NexisAcademic Universe, The Seattle Times, Global Newsbank, and The New York Times—ontheir coverage of the local, national, and international protests that accompanied the WorldTrade Organization’s (WTO) Third Ministerial Conference in Seattle, Washington in late1999. Using the Media Sensitivity-Protest Intensity Model of event reporting, we find thatactivist-based web sites report a greater number of transnational protest events at the local,national, and international level. We also find that activist-based websites are less positivelyinfluenced by the intensity properties of protest events. In the age of globalization, researchon transnational movements should therefore combine conventional media sources andactivist-based web sources.