Mobilizing democracy

Mobilizing democracy: globalization and citizen protest. By Paul Almeida. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2014. 216pp. £38.50. ISBN 978 1 42141 408 9. Available as e-book. Paul Almeida's empirically rich account of social protests in the six Central American countries studied in Mobilizing democracy significantly advances understandings of the conditions under which mass protest campaigns take hold, or fail to emerge. On the basis of a comparative analysis of the contrasting cases of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras during the period from 1980 to 2013, the book significantly advances understandings of the conditions that enable or prevent social mobilization against economic reforms commonly associated with global economic integration and state retrenchment. In particular, Almeida offers an engaging analysis of the nature of the multisectoral alliances that have characterized successful protest campaigns across the region, as well as insights into the ways in which popular protest groups strategically learn where to organize and which tactics to employ. The book combines in original ways path dependency analysis of varying state development processes in Central America, with due consideration of subnational patterns of social mobilization. With regard to the former, Almeida's account of the central role that the distribution of state infrastructure (local government offices, roads, public universities) and community organizational resources (non-governmental organizations, labour-based associations, local opposition parties) plays in facilitating protest campaigns, sheds important light on often overlooked factors shaping patterns of social mobilization

Civil society · Democracy · Development economics · Economics · Globalization · Mass mobilization · Mobilization · Opposition (politics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Retrenchment · Social movement · Sociology · State (computer science · Elite Sociology and Global Capitalism · International Development and Aid · Law · Politics and Society in Latin America · Public Administration