Wada 2006

“Claim Network Analysis: How are Social Protests Transformed into Political Protests in Mexico?” Takeshi Wada 95-111

in Johnston, Hank, and Paul Almeida, eds. 2006. Latin American social movements: globalization, democratization, and transnational networks. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield.

• Introduction
• The current state of citizenship in any given country is a historical outcome of contentious claims making by citizens upon the state and the state’s responses (95)
• Neoliberal turn in Mexico triggered disputes over citizenship expectations (96)
• yet while political opportunity remained rather closed, due to yet-democratized state...
• cultural opportunity was closing, since the neoliberal turn caused the closing of the old master frame of social and collective rights based in the Revolution
• Other scholars found a shift in protest from social to political protests, ie demanding civil rights instead of social outcomes
• author differentiates between goal oriented and strategic (means oriented) claims
• goal oriented: why people engage in collective action
• strategic/means-oriented: how people engage in collective actions
• traces different claims made by protesters and whether they are goal- or means-oriented
• Results: Political rights have supplanted past demands of social rights and material demands, BUT that political rights are often demanded strategically, main goal may be social/civil rights/other issues/outcomes
• Theory and Methodology
• Applies to study of popular protest in authoritarian context (97)
• Broad cultural frames usually allow/legitimize for some claims making
• uses event analysis and newspaper reports (97-98)
• Neoliberal Reforms and Visions of Citizenship in Mexico
• during the period of hegemony, ideas of “revolutionary nationalism” meant that the ruling elite was more tolerant of demands focused on social aspects of citizenship, less so of civil or political aspects (98)
• the population responded when the elite, in starting neoliberl turn, began to withdraw traditional rights
• Methods (99-101)
• newspapers
• usings network analysis-style thing to see what sorts of rights are being demanded, how, and in conjunction with what other rights
• baskets: social, political, civil, economic, socioeconomic
• three periods (101-102):
• post-revolutionary, 1964-1982
• neoliberal transition, 1983-1994
• neoliberal consolidation, 1995-2000
• Results
• general
• civil and political claims increased (102)
• number of campaigns increased over time
• social claims stable and low
• economic and socio economic claims fluctuate, diverge across media sources
• relational
• citizens often made multiple claims simultaneously (103)
• economic demands were the most important throughout (104), but increasingly these demands were coupled with political, social, and civil demands, as the latter seemed to become more important as the former became more difficult to achieve as singular demands during the neoliberal period
• author suggests this means that civil and political rights were increasingly valued in themselves
• my take: could just be the neoliberal government wouldn’t budge on economic issues
• social demands began to be used more strategically during the neoliberal period, that is, social demands were made in order to get something else more important (105, 107)
• most of the “claims spheres” increased their dependence on the political sphere during the neoliberal periods (105)
• Discussion
• the prominence of political claim makings is the result of decay of revolutionary ideals and the slow opening of political democratization (108)
• Overall claim: networks of protest were “politicized”, because of the prominence of the political demands vis a vis other demands (110)