Protests, signaling, and elections: conceptualizing opposition-movement interactions during Argentina’s anti-government protests (2012-2013)

ABSTRACT

This article explores the interface of protest movements and opposition parties, considering this remains conceptually under-specified. It does so by proposing a processual framework involving three mechanisms of party-movement interaction – signaling, frame-alignment, and coalition-building – at play in different phases of a contentious cycle unfolding under electoral conditions. Drawing on novel interview data, the article validates this proposal by tracing direct and indirect effects between protest signals, activists, and Argentine opposition parties during the year-long contentious cycle that preceded the defeat of the Kirchner government in the 2013 legislative elections. On this basis, it is argued that interactive dynamics between protest actors and political parties can significantly affect opposition politics, supporting the emergence of collaborative strategies that may have major electoral implications. The article thus makes relevant theoretical and empirical contributions, by both offering an analytical bridge between social movement and party politics literatures with potential for further elaboration, while illuminating new developments concerning the positioning of Latin American center-right parties in relation to mass protests.

KEYWORDS:

• Contentious politics
• party politics
• elections
• mass protests
• Argentina

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all participants of the 2017 ECPR Joint Session Workshop ‘A Closely Coupled Tango? Interactions between Electoral and Protest Politics’, where a draft version of this article was presented and discussed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The FR emerged in June 2013, shortly after the launch of FAUNEN, representing a Peronist but non-Kirchnerist faction led by Sergio Massa, CFK’s former Chief of Staff.

2. The resulting database comprised 497 articles, gathered during the fifteen days prior and after each protest event, from the ‘Domestic Politics’ and ‘Opinion’ sections of the three sources.

3. The interviews involved the leaders of nine Facebook fan pages promoting the rallies (albeit some were managed by three or four individuals), and two activists linked with both the activists and some secondary opposition figures (see Table A1 in Annex). The relevance of these pages was established by triangulating information such as their number of ‘likes’, references in the local press, and mentions in secondary academic sources.

4. Although the fan pages were singled out by newspapers as the diffusors of the protests, only one activist publicly recognized his/her involvement. Moreover, even when most participated in the marches, their identities remained ignored. For this reason, in Table A1 their names have been anonymized. Interviews were in Spanish and translated by the authors.

5. The socio-economic profile of the cyber-activists largely matched the character of these protests: 90% of them lived in Buenos Aires City and its immediate suburbs, and most were of middle-class background, holding independent occupations. They were also mostly male (73%).

6. Some activists claim that funding was offered by bodies such as the Argentine Rural Society (SRA), a strongly anti-Kirchnerist agrarian federation, later in the protest cycle, but this offer was allegedly rejected.

7. Although activists held a variety of political stances, the main split was between those who advocated for the creation of a new independent party, and those who viewed an alliance with opposition parties as the most practical path to defeat Kirchnerism.

8. Holding a meeting with Mauricio Macri and Marcos Peña, his main advisor and Chief of Staff when elected President, activists characterized their attitude as ‘lukewarm’ (Interview with AA, 2/11/2016).

9. The famous rallying cry behind the 2001 protests, that culminated with the resignation of the UCR president Fernando De la Rúa.

10. Mauricio Macri expressed his endorsement of the third protest via social media, calling for a civic movement to ‘stop Kirchnerism’, defend the country’s institutions, and prevent the FPV’s from turning Argentina into Venezuela (Rosemberg, 2013).

11. Relevantly these were sub-national issues, of higher relevance in Buenos Aires and its suburbs than in other parts of the country.

12. In addition to Macri, this included Gabriela Michetti (current vice-President), Marcos Peña (Chief of Staff), Alfonso Prat-Gay (Minister of Economy until December 2016), Patricia Bullrich (Minister of Security), Sergio Bergman (Minister of Environment), and Ricardo Buryaile (Minister of Agriculture until 2017), among others.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tomás Gold

Tomás Gold is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, and a PhD fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. Previously, he has been research fellow at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas in Argentina, and visiting research fellow at the Université du Québec à Montréal in Canada.

Alejandro M. Peña

Alejandro M. Peña is Assistant Professor in International Relations at the University of York. He is the author of Transnational Governance and South American Politics: The Political Economy of Norms (Palgrave, 2016) and has published in journals such as New Political Economy, European Journal of International Relations, Mobilization, Bulletin of Latin American Research, and others, on issues concerning protest movements, state-business relations, and private regulation and governance.