Understanding Protest Outcomes: Indigenous Movements, Demand Making and the State in Latin America

Do demands and tactics matter for protest outcomes? Despite renewed attention regarding the outcomes of social movement activity, recent scholarship has produced conflicting results about protest outcomes; if any, the effects of social protest are suggested to be indirect, through the intervention of political opportunity or public opinion. Moreover, much of the literature on protest outcomes continues to focus on cases from the US and Europe, while the scholarship on indigenous social movements in Latin America has predominantly featured single case studies. By developing a theory of demand making based on the insights of studies of Latin American indigenous movements to supplement the theoretical knowledge about protest outcomes, this study successfully combines theories from the ‘North’ and the ‘South’ to explain a topical question: what explains the divergent outcomes of indigenous movements in Latin America. Analysing indigenous protest events in 13 Latin American countries between 2003 and 2013 shows that in fact choices of demands and tactics of indigenous protesters do influence the outcomes of protest to an important extent. Much of this effect relies on the economic cost implied by different demands and tactics. This is not to deny the importance of indirect factors; in particular, the nature of the political environment plays an important role in determining the outcomes of indigenous protest. Yet these results pose questions about the generalisability of such findings beyond Latin America. In particular, does the mechanism of economic cost function differently depending on the level of institutional and infrastructural development of the state? It is through exploring the role of the state in affecting the success of social movements in different settings that both commonalities and the contradictions of social movement theories from the ‘North’ and the ‘South’ can be fruitfully explored.