Event Analysis of Claim Making in Mexico: How are Social Protests Transformed into Political Protests?

Abstract

Why do citizens demand certain kinds of citizenship rights rather than another in a given context? This article extends the idea of political and cultural opportunities to Mexico's authoritarian context to explore why Mexicans, who had prioritized social rights over other rights, came to emphasize political rights in a context of neoliberalism. In particular, I ask how this transformation from social protests to political protests happened when neither political nor cultural opportunities appeared to be conducive to it? I gathered 1174 episodes of popular protests between 1964 and 2000 from Mexican newspapers and employed a quantitative event analysis to examine discursive aspects of claims making. In the neoliberal period, demands for social rights and material issues were made increasingly in conjunction with demands for political rights. Mexicans came to realize that their everyday needs and redistributive demands would not be satisfied without dealing with undemocratic political system. It is this change in people's recognition that pushed political claims making to the forefront of popular contention in Mexico.