Context Is Only Part of the Puzzle: Short-term Structural Factors in the Mass Mobilization Process

Abstract

As touched upon in the introduction, it is common practice for political scientists to infer causal implications of short-term contextual factors, such as political or economic crises, in the production of mass mobilization (Åslund and McFaul 2006, Birn 2005, Eckstein 2001, Epstien 2004, Giarracca and Teubal 2001, Tucker 2007). In the case of Ukraine, a political crisis in the form of election fraud, as noted by Tucker (2007), and foreign influence, as noted by Åslund and McFaul, are seen as the main explanatory factors of the 2004 mass mobilization (Åslund and McFaul 2006, 97, 152). In the case of Argentina Fiorucci and Klein (2004) and Giarraca and Teubal (2004), among others, highlight the economic crisis and specifically the corralito as the main factor explaining mass mobilization in 2001. These explanations seem to miss a piece of the puzzle, namely, that while there have been several instances of economic and political crises in both countries, not all have produced the outcome of mass mobilization. It must be that factors beyond crisis and deprivation are equally if not more important in the process leading to the moments of mass mobilization in 2001 and 2004. This puzzle leads us to return to our main question: What is the process leading to the moment of mass mobilization? And we are provoked to ask: How do contextual (endogenous and exogenous) variables affect this process?KeywordsFocus GroupEuropean Social SurveyPolitical LegitimacyMass MobilizationPolitical CrisisThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.